PONKAPOG  TO  I 


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«        .       .^      1A I  ^ 


^  TJ?  -  f  1- 


UMIY.  i>F  CALIF.  LIBRARY,  LOS  ANGELEir 


FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH 


' 


THOMAS    BAILEY   ALDRICH 


FROM 


PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH 


ELEVENTH    EDITION 


'BOSTON 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND   COMPANY 
New  York:  11  East  Seventeenth  Street 


1898 


Copyright,  1883, 
By  T.  B.  ALDBICH. 

All  rights  reserved. 


The  Riverside  Press,  Cambridge*  Mats.,  IT.  S.  A. 
Electrotyped  and  Printed  by  H.  O.  Houghton  &  Company. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 
I. 

PROLOGUE 7 

n. 

DATS  WITH  THE  DEAD 13 

in. 

BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR  ....    37 

IV. 
WATS  AND  MANNERS 53 

V. 

A  VISIT  TO  A  CERTAIN  OLD  GENTLEMAN  ....    71 

VI. 
ON  A  BALCONY 117 

vn. 

SMITH 163 

VIIL 
A  DAT  IN  AFRICA 195 

IX. 
ON  GETTING  BACK  AGAIN 261 


2125842 


As  for  thefe  Obferuations  which  I  now  exhibite  vnto 
thy  gentle  cenfure,  take  them  I  pray  thee  in  good  part 
till  I  prefent  better  vnto  thee  after  my  next  trauels. 

CORYAT'S  CRUDITIES.    1611. 


I. 

PROLOGUE. 


FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 


PROLOGUE. 

THE  reader  will  probably  not  find  Ponk- 
apog  set  down  in  any  but  the  very  latest 
gazetteer.  It  is  the  Indian  name  of  a  little 
New  England  village,  from  which  the  wri- 
ter sallied  forth,  a  while  ago,  on  a  pilgrim- 
age beyond  the  sea.  Ponkapog  scarcely 
merits  a  description,  and  Pesth — the  far- 
thest point  east  to  which  his  wanderings 
led  him  —  has  been  too  often  described. 
He  is  thus  happily  relieved  of  the  onus  of 
making  strictly  good  the  title  of  these 
papers,  whose  chief  merit,  indeed,  is  that 
they  treat  of  neither  Pesth  nor  Ponkapog. 

It  was  a  roundabout  road  the  writer  took 
to  reach  the  Hungarian  capital  —  a  road 


10     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

that  carried  him  as  far  north  as  Inverness, 
as  far  south  as  Naples,  and  left  him  free  to 
saunter  leisurely  through  Spain  and  spend 
a  day  in  Africa.  But  the  ground  he  passed 
over  had  been  worn  smooth  by  the  feet  of 
millions  of  tourists  and  paved  three  deep 
with  books  of  travel.  He  was  too  wise  to 
let  anything  creep  into  his  note-book  be- 
yond a  strip  of  landscape  here  and  there,  a 
street  scene  in  sepia,  or  an  outline  sketch 
of  some  custom  or  peculiarity  that  chanced 
to  strike  his  fancy  —  and  these  he  offers 
modestly  to  the  reader. 

What  is  newest  to  one  in  foreign  coun- 
tries is  not  always  the  people,  but  their 
surroundings,  and  those  same  little  details 
of  life  and  circumstance  which  make  no 
impression  on  a  man  in  his  own  land  untili 
he  returns  to  it  after  a  prolonged  absence, 
and  then  they  stand  out  very  sharply  for  a 
while.  Neither  an  Italian,  nor  a  French- 
man, nor  a  Saxon  is  worth  travelling  three 
thousand  miles  by  sea  to  look  upon.  It  is 


PROLOGUE.  11 

Naples,  and  not  the  Neapolitan,  that  lin- 
gers in  your  memory.  If  your  memory  ac- 
cepts the  Neapolitan,  it  is  always  with  a 
bit  of  Renaissance  architecture  adhering  to 
him,  with  a  stretch  of  background  that 
shall  include  his  pathetic  donkey,  the  blue 
bay,  the  sullen  peak  of  Vesuvius,  and  gray 
Capri  in  the  distance.  If  you  could  trans- 
port the  man  bodily  to  New  York,  the  only 
thing  left  to  do  would  be  to  drop  him  into 
the  Hudson.  He  would  be  like  Emerson's 
sparrow,  that  no  longer  pleased  when  he 
was  removed  from  the  context  of  sky  and 
river.  It  is  the  details  that  attract  or  repel 
more  than  we  are  aware.  How  sensitive  to 
details  is  the  eye,  unconsciously  taking  their 
stamp  on  its  retina  and  retaining  the  im- 
pl^ssion  forever !  It  is  many  a  day  since 
the  writer  was  hi  the  old  walled  town  of 
Chester ;  he  does  not  recall  a  single  feature 
of  the  hundreds  of  men  and  women  he  met 
in  those  quiet,  gable-shadowed  streets  ;  but 
on  the  door  of  a  house  there,  in  a  narrow 


12     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

court,  was  a  grotesque  bronze  knocker 
which  caught  his  eye  for  an  instant  in  pass- 
ing :  that  knocker  somehow  screwed  itself 
to  his  mind  without  his  cognizance,  and 
now  at  intervals,  even  after  all  these  nights 
and  days,  it  raps  very  distinctly  on  his 
memory. 


n. 
DAYS  WITH  THE   DEAD 


IL 

DAYS  WITH  THE  DEAD. 
I. 

THEY  have  a  fashion  across  the  water, 
particularly  on  the  Continent,  of  making 
much  of  their  dead.  A  fifteenth  or  a  six- 
teenth century  celebrity  is  a  revenue  to  the 
church  or  town  in  which  the  distinguished 
ashes  may  chance  to  repose.  It  would  be 
an  interesting  operation,  if  it  were  prac- 
ticable, to  draw  a  line  between  the  local 
reverence  for  the  virtues  of  the  deceased 
and  that  strictly  mundane  spirit  which  re- 
gards him  as  assets.  The  two  are  so  nicely 
dovetailed  that  I  fancy  it  would  be  quite 
impossible,  in  most  instances,  to  say  where 
the  one  ends  and  the  other  begins. 

In  the  case  of  the  good  Cardinal  Borro- 
meo,  for  example.  The  good  cardinal  died 


16  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

in  1584.  He  is  one  of  the  loveliest  figures 
in  history.  Nobly  born,  rich,  and  learned, 
he  devoted  himself  and  his  riches  to  holy 
deeds.  The  story  of  his  life  is  a  record  of 
beautiful  sacrifices  and  unselfish  charities. 
Though  his  revenue  was  princely,  his  quick 
sympathies  often  left  him  as  destitute  as 
a  Franciscan  friar.  His  vast  possessions 
finally  dwindled  to  a  meagre  patrimony. 
During  the  great  plague  at  Milan,  in  1576, 
he  sold  what  was  left  of  his  plate  and  fur- 
niture to  buy  bread  for  the  famishing  peo- 
ple. When  he  died,  all  Italy  wept  for 
him  like  one  pair  of  eyes.  He  lies  in  the 
crypt  of  the  cathedral  at  Milan.  It  is 
dark  down  in  the  crypt;  but  above  him 
are  carvings  and  gildings  and  paintings, 
basking  in  the  mellow  light  sifted  through 
the  immense  choir  windows  — 

"  Innumerable  of  stains  and  splendid  dyes 
As  are  the  tiger-moth's  deep-damasked  wings." 

Above  the  fretted  roof  the  countless  "  stat- 
ued  pinnacles  "  lift  themselves  into  the  blue 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  17 

air.  How  magical  all  that  delicate  needle- 
work of  architecture  looks,  by  moonlight 
or  sunlight  I 

"0  Milan,  0  the  chanting  quires, 
The  giant  windows'  blazoned  fires, 
The  height,  the  space,  the  gloom,  the  glory ! 
A  mount  of  marble,  a  hundred  spires !  " 

When  they  show  you  the  embalmed 
body  of  Borromeo  —  for  it  is  really  the 
body  and  not  merely  the  sarcophagus  they 
show  you  —  the  custode,  a  priest,  lights  the 
high  candles  on  either  side  of  the  silver- 
encrusted  altar.  The  cardinal's  remains 
are  kept  in  an  hermetically-sealed  case  of 
rock  crystal  set  within  a  massive  oak  coffin, 
one  side  of  which  is  lowered  by  a  windlass. 
There  he  lies  in  his  jeweled  robes,  with 
his  gloved  hands  crossed  on  his  bosom  and 
his  costly  crosier  at  his  side,  just  as  they 
laid  him  away  in  1584.  The  features  are 
wonderfully  preserved,  and  have  not  lost 
the  placid  expression  they  wore  when  he 
fell  asleep,  —  that  look  of  dreamy  serenity 


18  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

peculiar  to  the  faces  of  dead  persons.  The 
head  is  bald,  and  as  black  as  ebony.  There 
were  services  going  on,  the  day  we  visited 
the  cathedral.  Above  us  the  crowds  came 
and  went  on  the  mosaic  pavements,  but  no 
sound  of  the  outside  world  penetrated  to 
the  dim,  begemmed  chapel  where  Carlo 
Borromeo,  count,  cardinal,  and  saint,  takes 
what  rest  he  can.  We  stood  silent  in  the 
unflaring  candlelight,  gazing  on  the  figure 
which  had  been  so  beloved  in  Milan  three 
centuries  ago.  Presently  the  black-robed 
custode  turned  the  noiseless  crank,  and  the 
coffin  side  slowly  ascended  to  its  place.  It 
was  all  very  solemn  and  impressive  —  too 
impressive  and  too  solemn  altogether  for  so 
small  a  sum  as  five  francs. 

I  am  but  an  intermittent  worshiper  of 
saints ;  yet  I  have  an  ineradicable  belief  in 
good  men  like  Carlo  Borromeo,  and,  as  he 
has  long  since  finished  his  earthly  tasks, 
I  think  it  would  be  showing  the  cardinal 
greater  respect  to  bury  him  than  to  exhibit 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  19 

him.  He  nearly  spoiled  my  visit  to  Milan. 
I  resolved  to  have  no  further  commerce 
with  the  dead,  directly  or  indirectly.  But 
the  dead  play  a  very  prominent  part  in  the 
experience  of  the  wanderer  abroad.  The 
houses  in  which  they  were  born,  the  tombs 
in  which  they  lie,  the  localities  they  made 
famous  by  their  good  or  evil  deeds,  and  the 
works  their  genius  left  behind  them  are 
necessarily  the  chief  shrines  of  his  pilgrim- 
age. You  leave  London  with  a  distincter 
memory  of  the  monuments  in  Westminster 
Abbey  and  St.  Paul's  than  of  the  turbu- 
lent streams  of  life  that  surge  through  the 
Strand.  Mr.  Blank,  to  whom  you  bore  a 
letter  of  introduction,  is  not  so  real  a  per- 
son to  you  as  John  Milton,  whose  grave 
you  saw  at  St.  Giles's,  Cripplegate  or  De 
Foe,  who  sleeps  in  the  melancholy  Bunhill 
Fields  Burial  Ground.  You  catch  yourself 
assisting,  with  strange  relish,  at  the  burn- 
ing of  heretics  at  Smithfield.  Ridley  and 
Latimer  stand  before  you  in  flesh  and  bone 


20      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

and  flame  at  Oxford.  Thomas  a  Becket 
falls  stabbed  at  your  feet  on  the  stone  flag- 
ging in  Canterbury  Cathedral.  At  Holy- 
rood,  are  not  Darnley  and  pallid  Ruthven 
in  his  steel  corselet  forever  creeping  up 
that  narrow  spiral  staircase  leading  to  the 
small  cabinet  where  Rizzio  is  supping  with 
the  luckless  queen?  You  cannot  escape 
these  things  if  you  would.  Your  railway 
carriage  takes  you  up  at  one  famous  grave 
and  sets  you  down  at  another.  Madrid  is 
but  a  stepping-stone  to  the  gloomy  Escorial, 
with  its  underground  library  of  gilded  cof- 
fins —  a  library  of  royal  octavos,  one  might 
say,  for  none  but  Spanish  kings  and  queens 
are  shelved  there.1  In  Paris,  where  the 
very  atmosphere  thrills  with  intense  life, 

1  Spanish  post-mortem  etiquette  excludes  the  late  Queen 
Mercedes  from  this  apartment,  as  none  but  queens  who  have 
been  mothers  of  kings  are  allowed  sanctuary  here.  On  a 
shelf  at  the  left  of  the  entrance  to  the  tomb,  an  empty  sar- 
cophagus, of  the  same  ornate  pattern  as  the  others,  awaits 
Alfonso  XII.  It  would  probably  not  wait  long  for  him  if 
Spanish  republicanism  had  its  will. 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  21 

you  are  brought  at  each  step  face  to  face 
with  the  dead.  JVhat  people  are  these 
that  flit  in  groups  up  and  down  the  bril- 
liant boulevards?  They  are  not  sipping 
absinthe  and  taking  their  ease  —  the  poor 
ghosts,  old  and  new!  Can  you  stand  in 
the  Place  de  la  Concorde  and  not  think 
of  the  twenty-eight  hundred  persons  who 
were  guillotined  there  between  1793  and 
1795?  A  few  minutes'  walk  from  the 
crowded  cafes  leads  you  to  the  morgue, 
"the  little  Doric  morgue,"  as  Browning 
calls  it.  The  golden  dome  of  the  Invalides 
keeps  perpetually  in  your  mind  "the  ter- 
ror of  Europe,"  held  down  by  sixty  tons 
of  porphyry,  in  the  rotunda.  The  neatly- 
swept  asphalt  under  your  feet  ran  blood 
but  yesterday.  Here  it  was,  near  the  Tui- 
leries,  the  insurgents  threw  up  a  barricade. 
Those  white  spots  which  you  observe  on 
the  faqade  of  yonder  building,  the  Made- 
leine, are  bits  of  new  stone  set  into  the 
sacrilegious  shot-holes.  On  the  verge  of 


22  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  city,  and  within  sound  of  its  feverish 
heart-throb,  stretch  Pere  la  Chaise  and 
Montmartre  and  Mont  Parnasse,  pathetic 
with  renowned  names. 

I  suppose  that  a  taste  for  churchyards 
and  cemeteries  is  a  cultivated  taste.  At 
home  they  were  entirely  disconnected  in 
my  mind  with  any  thought  of  enjoyment ; 
but  after  a  month  on  the  other  side  I  pre- 
ferred a  metropolitan  graveyard  to  almost 
any  object  of  interest  that  could  be  pre- 
sented to  me.  A  cemetery  at  home  sug- 
gests awkward  possibilities ;  but  nothing  of 
the  kind  occurs  to  you  in  rambling  through 
a  foreign  burial-ground.  As  our  gamins 
would  say,  it  is  not  your  funeral.  You 
wander  along  the  serpentine  walk  as  you 
would  stroll  through  a  picture  gallery. 
You  as  little  think  of  adding  a  mound  to 
the  one  as  you  would  of  contributing  a 
painting  to  the  other.  You  survey  the 
monoliths  and  the  bas-reliefs  and  the  urns 
and  the  miniature  Athenian  temples  from 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  23 

the  stand-point  of  an  unbiased  spectator 
who  has  paid  his  admittance  fee  and  ex- 
pects entertainment  or  instruction.  Some 
of  the  pleasantest  hours  I  passed  in  sight- 
seeing were  spent  in  graveyards.  Among 
the  most  notable  things  we  saw  were  the 
Jewish  cemetery  at  Prague,  with  its  smoky 
Gothic  synagogue  of  the  thirteenth  cen- 
tury (the  Altneuschule),  and  the  ancient 
churchyard  of  St.  John  at  Nuremberg, 
where  Hans  Sachs  and  many  another  wor- 
thy of  his  day  lie  at  rest,  and  where  the 
remains  of  Albrecht  Diirer  once  rested  — 
painter,  poet,  architect,  and  engraver,  the 
master  of  almost  everything  except  Mrs. 
Diirer.  The  engraved  brass  plates  —  the 
P.  P.  C.  cards,  so  to  speak,  of  the  departed 
aristocracy  of  Nuremberg — on  the  horizon- 
tal slabs  of  St.  John's  are  very  quaint,  with 
their  crests,  and  coats-of-arms,  and  sym- 
bols of  gentility.  At  Prague  the  stones 
are  marked  with  pitchers  and  hands,  to 
designate  the  descendants  of  the  tribes  of 


24      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

Levi  and  Aaron.  They  claim  to  have  one 
stone  that  dates  as  far  back  as  A.  D.  606. 
Some  of  the  graves  are  held  in  great  vener- 
ation; that  of  Rabbi  Abignor  Kara,  who 
died  in  1439,  is  often  made  the  point  of 
pilgrimage  by  Jews  living  in  distant  lands, 
Within  the  yard  is  a  building  where  the 
funeral  rites  are  performed,  and  grave- 
clothes  are  kept  for  all  comers.  The  dead 
millionaire  and  the  dead  pauper  are  arrayed 
in  the  same  humble  garb,  and  alike  given 
to  earth  in  a  rough  board  coffin.  The  Jew- 
ish custom,  like  death  itself,  is  no  respecter 
of  persons.  There  is  a  fine  austerity  in  this. 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  25 


n. 

It  was  always  more  or  less  of  a  satisfac- 
tion to  observe  that  the  mortuary  sculp- 
tures of  the  Old  World  were  every  whit 
as  hideous  as  our  own.  The  sepulchral  de- 
signs in  churches  abroad  are  generally  in 
the  worst  style  of  Middle  Age  realism.  A 
half-draped  skeleton  of  Death,  plunging  his 
dart  into  the  bosom  of  some  emaciated 
marble  girl,  seems  to  have  been  a  consol- 
ing symbol  to  the  survivors  a  few  centu- 
ries ago.  This  ghastly  fancy  is  constantly 
under  your  eyes.  If  I  call  it  ghastly  I  give 
expression  to  the  effect  it  produced  on  me 
at  first.  It  would  not  be  honest  for  me  to 
affirm  that  I  did  not  like  it  at  last.  I  be- 
came so  accustomed  to  this  skeleton  and 
his  brother  monstrosities  that  when  we 
visited  those  three  grim  chambers  under 
the  Churcli  of  the  Capuchins  at  Rome, 


26  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

and  saw  the  carefully  polished  skulls  of 
hundreds  of  monks  wrought  into  pillars 
and  arches  and  set  upon  shelves,  I  looked 
at  them  as  complacently  as  if  they  had 
been  a  lot  of  exploded  percussion-caps. 
"It  is  a  pity  they  can't  be  used  again," 
I  thought ;  and  that  was  all.  I  began  to 
believe  the  beautiful  economy  of  nature 
to  be  greatly  overrated. 

This  is  the  burial-place  of  the  Cappuc- 
cini,  who  esteem  it  a  blissful  privilege  to 
lie  here  for  a  few  years  in  consecrated 
earth  brought  from  Jerusalem,  and  then, 
when  their  graves  are  wanted  for  fresher 
brothers,  to  be  taken  up  and  transformed 
into  architectural  decorations.  The  walls 
and  recesses  and  arched  ceilings  of  these 
chapels  (which  are  beneath  the  church 
but  not  under  ground)  are  thus  orna- 
mented with  the  brotherhood  skillfully  ar- 
ranged in  fanciful  devices,  the  finger-joints 
and  the  fragile  links  of  the  vertebral  col- 
umn being  wrought  into  friezes  and  light 


DAYS    WITH   THE  DEAD.  27 

cornices,  and  the  larger  bones  arranged  in 
diamonds  and  hearts  and  rounds,  like  the 
sabres  and  bayonets  in  an  armory.  Here 
and  there  on  the  ceiling  is  a  complete 
skeleton  set  into  the  plaster,  quite  sug- 
gestive of  a  cool  outline  by  Flaxman  or 
Retzsch.  The  poor  monks!  they  were  not 
very  ornamental  in  life ;  but  time  is  full  of 
compensations.  Death  seems  to  have  re- 
lieved them  of  one  unhappy  characteristic. 
"  There  is  no  disagreeable  scent,"  says  the 
author  of  The  Marble  Faun,  describing 
this  place,  "  such  as  might  have  been  ex- 
pected from  the  decay  of  so  many  holy 
persons,  in  whatever  odor  of  sanctity  they 
may  have  taken  their  departure.  The  same 
number  of  living  monks  would  not  smell 
half  so  unexceptionably."  The  Capuchin 
golgotha  is  more  striking  than  the  Roman 
or  the  Parisian  catacombs,  for  the  reason 
that  its  contracted  limits  do  not  allow  you 
to  escape  from  the  least  of  its  horrible 
grotesqueness.  In  the  catacombs  you  aro 


28      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH, 

impressed  by  their  extent  rather  than  by 
anything  else. 

Rome  is  one  enormous  mausoleum.  There 
the  Past  lies  visibly  stretched  upon  his  bier. 
There  is  no  to-day  or  to-morrow  in  Rome  ; 
it  is  perpetual  yesterday.  One  might  lift 
up  a  handful  of  dust  anywhere  and  say, 
with  the  Persian  poet,  "  This  was  once 
man."  Where  everything  has  been  so  long 
dead,  a  death  of  to-day  seems  almost  an  im- 
pertinence. How  quickly  and  with  what 
serene  irony  the  new  grave  is  absorbed  by 
the  universal  antiquity  of  the  place  !  The 
block  of  marble  over  Keats  does  not  appear 
a  day  fresher  than  the  neighboring  Pyr- 
amid of  Caius  Cestius.  Oddly  enough,  we 
saw  no  funeral  in  Rome.  In  almost  every 
other  large  city  it  was  our  fate,  either  as 
we  entered  or  departed,  to  meet  a  funeral 
cortege.  Every  one  stands  uncovered  as 
the  train  crawls  by,  the  vehicles  come  to  a 
halt  at  the  curbstone,  the  children  stop 
their  play,  heads  are  bowed,  golden  locks 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  29 

and  gray,  on  every  side.  As  I  have  said, 
though  in  a  different  sense,  they  make 
much  of  their  dead  abroad.  I  was  struck 
by  the  contrast  the  day  we  reached  home. 
Driving  from  the  steamer,  we  encountered 
a  hearse  straggling  down  Broadway.  It 
attracted  as  much  reverential  regard  as 
would  be  paid  to  an  ice-cart. 

I  happened  to  witness  a  picturesque 
funeral  in  Venice.  It  was  that  of  a  cho- 
rus-boy, in  a  church  on  one  of  the  smaller 
canals  somewhere  west  of  the  Rialto.  I 
stumbled  on  the  church  accidentally  that 
forenoon,  and  was  not  able  to  find  it  again 
the  next  day  —  a  circumstance  to  which 
the  incident  perhaps  owes  the  illusory  at- 
mosphere that  envelops  it  for  me.  The 
building  had  disappeared,  like  Aladdin's 
palace,  in  the  night. 

They  were  performing  a  mass  as  I  en- 
tered. The  great  rose  window  behind  the 
organ  and  the  chancel  windows  were  dark- 
ened with  draperies,  and  the  colossal  candles 


30      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

were  burning.  The  coffin,  covered  with  a 
heavily  embroidered  pall,  stood  on  an  ele- 
vated platform  in  front  of  the  magnificent 
altar.  The  inlaid  columns  glistening  in  the 
candle-light,  the  smoke  of  the  incense  curl- 
ing lazily  up  past  the  baldachino  to  the 
frescoed  dome,  the  priests  in  elaborate  stoles 
and  chasubles  kneeling  around  the  bier  — 
it  was  like  a  masterly  composed  picture. 
When  the  ceremonies  were  concluded,  the 
coffin  was  lifted  from  the  platform  by  six 
young  friars  and  borne  to  a  gondola  in 
waiting  at  the  steps  near  the  portals.  The 
priests,  carrying  a  huge  golden  crucifix 
and  several  tall  gilt  torches,  unlighted, 
crowded  into  the  bow  and  stern  of  the 
floating  hearse,  which  was  attached  by  a 
long  rope  to  another  gondola  occupied  by 
oarsmen.  Following  these  were  two  or 
three  covered  gondolas  whose  connection 
with  the  obsequies  was  not  clear  to  me,  as 
they  appeared  to  be  empty.  Slowly  down 
the  narrow  canal,  in  that  dead  stillness 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  31 

which  reigns  in  Venice,  swept  the  sombre 
flotilla,  bearing  its  unconscious  burden  to 
the  Campo  Santo.  The  air  was  full  of  va- 
grant spring  scents,  and  the  sky  that  arched 
over  all  was  carved  of  one  vast,  unclouded 
sapphire.  In  the  deserted  church  were  two 
old  crones  scraping  up  the  drippings  of  the 
wax  candles  from  the  tessellated  pavement. 
Nothing  except  time  is  wasted  in  Italy. 

I  saw  a  more  picturesque  though  not  so 
agreeable  a  funeral  in  Florence.  The  night 
of  our  arrival  was  one  of  those  unearthly 
moonlight  nights  which  belong  to  Italy. 
The  Arno,  changed  to  a  stream  of  quick- 
silver, flowed  swiftly  through  the  stone 
arches  of  the  Ponte  Vecchio  under  our 
windows,  and  lured  me  with  its  beauty  out- 
of-doors,  though  a  great  clock  somewhere 
near  by  had  just  clanged  eleven.  By  an 
engraving  I  had  seen  in  boyhood  I  recog- 
nized the  bridge  of  Taddeo  Gaddi,  -with  its 
goldsmith  shops  on  either  side.  They  were 
closed  now,  of  course.  I  strolled  across 


32      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  bridge  and  back  again,  once  or  twice, 
and  then  wandered  off  into  a  network  of 
dingy  streets,  traversed  by  one  street  so 
very  narrow  that  you  saw  only  a  hand's 
breadth  of  amethystine  sky  between  the 
tops  of  the  tall  buildings.  Standing  in  the 
middle  of  the  thoroughfare,  I  could  al- 
most touch  the  shutters  of  the  shops  right 
and  left.  At  the  upper  end  of  the  street, 
which  was  at  least  three  quarters  of  a 
mile  in  length,  the  overhanging  fronts  of 
the  lofty  houses  seemed  to  meet  and  shut 
out  the  dense  moonlight.  In  the  desper- 
ate struggle  which  took  place  there  be- 
tween the  moon  and  the  gloom,  a  hun- 
dred fantastic  shadows  slipped  from  coigne 
and  cornice  and  fell  into  the  street  below, 
like  besiegers  flung  from  the  ramparts  of 
some  old  castle.  Not  a  human  being  nor  a 
light  was  anywhere  visible.  Suddenly  I 
saw  what,  for  an  instant,  I  took  to  be  a 
falling  star  in  the  extreme  distance.  It 
approached  in  a  zigzag  course.  It  broke 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  33 

into  several  stars  ;  these  grew  larger  ;  then 
I  discovered  they  were  torches.  A  low  mo- 
notonous chant,  like  the  distant  chorus  of 
demons  in  an  opera,  reached  my  ear.  The 
chant  momently  increased  in  distinctness, 
and  as  the  torches  drew  nearer  I  saw  that 
they  were  carried  by  fifteen  or  twenty  per- 
sons marching  in  a  square,  in  the  middle  of 
which  was  a  bier  supported  by  a  number  of 
ghostly  figures.  The  procession  was  sweep- 
ing down  on  me  at  the  rate  of  six  miles  an 
hour  ;  the  training  pall  flapped  in  the  wind 
caused  by  the  velocity  of  the  march.  When 
the  cortege  was  within  twenty  or  thirty 
yards  of  me,  I  noticed  that  the  trestle- 
bearers  and  the  persons  who  held  the  flam- 
beaux were  shrouded  from  forehead  to  foot 
in  white  sheets  with  holes  pierced  for  the 
eyes.  I  never  beheld  anything  more  devil- 
ish. On  they  came,  occupying  the  whole 
width  of  the  narrow  street.  I  had  barely 
time  to  crowd  myself  into  a  projecting 
doorway,  when  they  swept  by  with  a  rhyth- 


34  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PEST II. 

mical  swinging  gait,  to  the  measure  of  their 
awful  threnody.  I  waited  until  the  muffled 
chant  melted  into  the  distance  —  and  then 
I  made  a  bee-line  for  the  hotel. 

In  Italy  the  hour  of  interment  is  grad- 
uated by  the  worldly  position  of  the  de- 
ceased. The  poor  are  buried  in  the  day- 
time ;  thus  the  expense  of  torches  is  avoid- 
ed. Illuminated  night-funerals  are  reserved 
for  the  wealthy  and  persons  of  rank.  At 
least,  I  believe  that  such  is  the  regulation, 
though  the  reverse  of  this  order  may  be  the 
case.  At  Naples,  I  know,  the  interments 
in  the  Campo  Santo  Vecchio  take  place  a 
little  before  sunset.  Shelley  said  of  the 
Protestant  Burying  Ground  at  Rome  that 
the  spot  was  lovely  enough  to  make  one  in 
love  with  death.  Nobody  would  dream  of 
saying  that  about  the  Campo  Santo  at  Na- 
ples—  a  parallelogram  of  several  hundred 
feet  in  length,  inclosed  on  three  sides  by  a 
high  wall  and  on  the  fourth  by  an  arcade. 
In  this  dreary  space,  approached  through  a 


DAYS    WITH  THE  DEAD.  35 

dismal  avenue  of  cypresses,  are  three  hun- 
dred and  sixty-six  deep  pits,  one  of  which 
is  opened  each  evening  to  receive  the  dead 
of  that  day,  and  then  sealed  up  —  one  pit 
for  each  day  of  the  year.  I  conjecture  that 
the  extra  pit  must  be  for  leap-year.  Only 
the  poorest  persons,  paupers  and  waifs,  are 
buried  here,  if  it  can  be  called  buried.  The 
body  is  usually  left  unattended  at  the  ar- 
cade, to  await  its  turn. 

There  is  a  curious  burial  custom  at  Mu- 
nich. The  law  requires  that  every  man, 
woman,  and  child  who  dies  within  city  lim- 
its shall  lie  in  state  for  three  days  in  the 
Leichenhaus  (dead  house)  of  the  Gottes- 
acker,  the  southern  cemetery,  outside  the 
Sendling  Gate.  This  is  to  prevent  any 
chance  of  premature  burial,  an  instance 
of  which,  many  years  ago,  gave  rise  to  the 
present  provision.  The  Leichenhaus  is  com- 
prised of  three  large  chambers  or  salons, 
in  which  the  dead  are  placed  upon  raised 
couches  and  surrounded  by  flowers.  A 


36  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

series  of  wide  windows  giving  upon  the  ar- 
cade affords  the  public  an  unobstructed 
view  of  the  interior.  The  spectacle  is  not 
so  repellant  as  one  might  anticipate.  The 
neatly-kept,  well-lighted  rooms,  the  profu- 
sion of  flowers,  and  the  scrupulous  propri- 
ety which  prevails  in  all  the  arrangements 
make  the  thing  as  little  terrible  as  possible. 
On  the  Sunday  of  our  visit  to  the  Gottes- 
acker,  the  place  was  unusually  full  of  bodies 
awaiting  interment  —  old  men  and  women, 
young  girls  and  infants.  Some  were  like 
exquisite  statues,  others  like  wax-figures, 
and  all  piteous.  Attached  to  the  hand  of 
each  adult  was  a  string  or  wire  connected 
with  a  bell  in  the  custodian's  apartment. 
It  would  be  difficult  to  imagine  a  more 
startling  sound  than  would  be  the  sudden 
kling-kling  of  one  of  those  same  bells ! 

But  I  have  been  playing  too  long  what 
Balzac  calls  a  solo  de  corbillard. 


m. 

BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND 
AMATEUR. 


in. 

BEGGAKS,    PROFESSIONAL    AND    AMATEUR. 

THERE  is  one  thing  that  sometimes 
comes  near  taking  the  joy  out  of  the  heart 
of  foreign  travel.  It  is  one  of  those  trifles 
which  frequently  prove  a  severer  test  to 
philosophy  than  calamities.  In  the  East 
this  thing  is  called  bakhshish,  in  Germany 
trinkgeld,  in  Italy  buonamano,  in  France 
pourboire,  in  England  —  I  do  not  know  how 
it  is  called  in  England,  but  it  is  called  for 
pretty  often.  In  whatever  soft,  insidious 
syllable  it  may  wrap  itself,  it  is  nothing 
but  hateful.  A  piece  of  money  which  is 
not  earned  by  honest  service,  but  is  ex- 
tracted from  you  as  a  matter  of  course  by 
any  vagabond  who  may  start  out  of  the 
bowels  of  the  earth,  like  a  gnome  or  a 
kobold,  at  the  sound  of  your  footfall,  is  a 


40      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

shameless  coin :  it  debases  him  that  gives 
and  him  that  takes. 

Everywhere  on  the  Continent  the  tourist 
is  looked  upon  as  a  bird  to  be  plucked,  and 
presently  the  bird  himself  feebly  comes  to 
regard  plucking  as  his  proper  destiny,  and 
abjectly  holds  out  his  wing  so  long  as  there 
is  a  feather  left  on  it.  I  say  everywhere 
on  the  Continent ;  but,  indeed,  a  man  of  or- 
dinary agility  might  walk  over  the  greater 
part  of  Europe  on  outstretched  palms.  Rus- 
sians and  Americans  have  the  costly  repu- 
tation of  being  lavish  of  money  on  their 
travels  —  the  latter  are  pictured  by  the 
fervid  Italian  imagination  as  residing  in 
gold-mines  located  in  California  and  various 
parts  of  the  State  of  New  York  —  and  are 
consequently  favorites.  The  Frenchman 
is  too  artful  and  the  Briton  too  brusque 
to  cut  up  well  as  victims.  The  Italian 
rarely  ventures  far  from  his  accustomed 
flea,  but  when  he  does,  like  the  German 
(who,  on  the  other  hand,  is  fond  of  travel- 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL   AND  AMATEUR.   41 

ling),  he  voyages  on  a  most  economical 
basis.  He  carries  off  the  unburnt  candle- 
end,  and  his  gratuities  are  homoeopathic. 
In  spite  of  his  cunning,  I  have  no  doubt  — 
I  should  be  sorry  to  doubt  —  that  his  own 
countrymen  skin  him  alive.  It  is  gratify- 
ing to  be  assured  by  Mr.  Howells,  in  his 
Italian  Journeys,  that  "these  ingenious 
people  prey  upon  their  own  kind  with  an 
avidity  as  keen  as  that  with  which  they 
devour  strangers ; "  he  is  even  "  half  per- 
suaded that  a  ready-witted  foreigner  fares 
better  among  them  than  a  traveller  of  their 
own  nation."  Nevertheless,  I  still  think 
that  the  privilege  of  being  an  American  is 
one  of  the  most  costly  things  in  Europe. 
It  is  ever  a  large,  though  invisible,  item  in 
your  account,  whether  you  halt  at  a  Pa- 
risian hStel  or  a  snuffy  posada  in  Catalo- 
nia. In  neither  place  has  the  landlord  the 
same  excuse  for  extortion  that  was  offered 
by  the  Ostend  inn-keeper  to  the  major- 
domo  of  George  II.,  on  one  of  his  trips 


42      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

from  England  to  Hanover.  "Are  eggs 
scarce  in  Ostend  ? "  inquired  the  major- 
domo,  with  supercilious  eyebrows.  "No," 
returned  the  honest  landlord,  "but  kings 
are."  Americans  are  not  scarce  anywhere. 
In  Italy  one  is  besieged  by  beggars, 
morning,  noon,  and  night;  a  small  coin 
generally  suffices,  and  a  modicum  of  good 
nature  always  goes  a  great  way.  There  is 
something  innocent  in  their  deepest  strat- 
egy, and  something  very  winning  in  the 
amiability  with  which  they  accept  the  sit- 
uation when  their  villainy  is  frustrated. 
Sometimes,  however,  when  the  petitioner 
is  not  satisfied  with  your  largess  —  as  al- 
ways happens  when  you  give  him  more 
than  he  expects  —  he  is  scarcely  polite.  I 
learned  this  from  a  venerable  ex-sailor  in 
Genoa.  "  Go,  brigand !  "  was  the  candid 
advice  of  that  ancient  mariner.  He  then 
fell  to  cursing  my  relatives,  the  family 
tomb,  and  everything  appertaining  to  me  — 
with  my  coin  warming  in  his  pocket. 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR.   43 

It  is  fair  to  observe  that  the  Italian  beg- 
gar usually  renders  tribute  to  an  abstract 
idea  of  manhood  by  assuming  that  he  has 
done  you  some  sort  of  service.  This  ser- 
vice is  not  generally  visible  to  the  unaided 
eye,  and  I  fancy  that  the  magnifying  glass 
of  sufficient  power  to  enable  you  always  to 
detect  it  has  yet  to  be  invented.  But  it  is 
to  his  everlasting  praise  that  he  often  does 
try  to  throw  a  veil  of  decency  over  the 
naked  injustice  of  his  demand,  though  he 
is  too  apt  to  be  content  with  the  thinnest 
of  fabrics.  I  have  paid  a  Neapolitan  gen- 
tleman ten  sous  for  leaning  against  a  dead- 
wall  in  front  of  a  hotel  window.  The  un- 
expectedness and  the  insinuating  audacity 
of  the  appeals  frequently  take  away  your 
presence  of  mind,  and  leave  you  limp. 
There  was  an  old  son  of  Naples  who  dwelt 
on  a  curb-stone  near  the  Castell  dell'  Ovo. 
Stumbling  on  his  private  public  residence 
quite  unintentionally,  one  forenoon,  I 
was  immediately  assessed.  Ever  after  he 


44  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

claimed  me,  and  finally  brought  his  son-in- 
law  to  me,  and  introduced  him  as  a  person 
combining  many  of  the  most  desirable  qual- 
ities of  a  pensioner.  One  of  his  strong 
points  was  that  he  had  been  accidentally 
carried  off  to  America,  having  fallen  asleep 
one  day  in  the  hold  of  a  fruit  vessel. 

"But,  sir,"  I  said,  "why  should  I  give 
you  anything  ?  I  don't  know  you." 

"  That  is  the  reason,  signor." 

At  bottom  it  was  an  excellent  reason. 
If  I  paid  the  father-in-law  for  the  pleasure 
of  knowing  him,  was  it  not  logical  and  just 
that  I  should  pay  the  son-in-law  for  the 
much  greater  pleasure  I  had  had  in  not 
knowing  him  ?  The  slightest  thing  will  serve, 
in  Italy,  for  a  lien  upon  your  exchequer. 
An  urchin  who  turns  himself  into  a  Cath- 
erine-wheel at  your  carriage  side,  or  stands 
on  his  head  under  the  very  hoofs  of  your 
horses,  approaches  you  with  the  confidence 
of  a  prodigal  son.  A  three-day-old  nose- 
gay thrown  into  your  lap  gives  a  small 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR.    45 

Italian  maiden  in  one  garment  the  right  to 
cling  to  the  footboard  of  your  vettura  until 
you  reimburse  her.  In  driving  from  Pom- 
peii to  Sorrento,  no  fewer  than  fifty  of 
these  floral  tributes  will  be  showered  upon 
you.  The  little  witches  who  throw  the 
flowers  are  very  often  pretty  enough  to  be 
caught  and  sculptured.  An  inadvertent 
glance  towards  a  fellow  sleeping  by  the 
roadside  places  you  at  once  in  a  false  posi- 
tion. I  have  known  an  even  less  compro- 
mising thing  than  a  turn  of  the  eyelid  to 
establish  financial  relations  between  the 
stranger  and  the  native.  I  have  known  a 
sneeze  to  do  it.  One  morning,  on  the  Mole 
at  Venice,  an  unassuming  effort  of  my  own 
in  this  line  was  attended  by  a  most  unex- 
pected result.  Eight  or  ten  young  raga- 
muffins, who  had  been  sunning  themselves 
at  a  gondola-landing,  instantly  started  up 
from  a  recumbent  posture  and  advanced 
upon  me  in  a  semicircle,  with  "  Salute^ 
vignor,  salute  !  "  One  of  these  youths  dis- 


46  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTII. 

turbed  a  preconceived  impression  of  mine 
by  suddenly  exclaiming,  — 

'•'  I  am  a  boy  Americano,  dam !  " 
As  I  had  not  come  so  far  from  home  to 
relieve  the  necessities  of  my  own  country- 
men, and  as  I  reflected  that  possibly  this 
rogue's  companions  were  also  profane  Amer- 
icani,  I  gave  them  nothing  but  a  genial 
smile,  which  they  divided  among  them  with 
the  resignation  that  seems  to  be  a  na- 
tional trait. 

The  transatlantic  impostor,  like  Meph- 
istopheles,  has  as  many  shapes  as  men  have 
fancies.  Sometimes  he  keeps  a  shop,  and 
sometimes  he  turns  a  hand-organ.  Now  he 
looks  out  at  you  from  the  cowl  of  a  medi- 
aeval monk,  and  now  you  behold  him  in  a 
white  choker,  pretending  to  be  a  verger. 
You  become  at  last  so  habituated  to  seeing 
persons  approach  in  formd  pauperis,  that 
your  barber  seems  to  lack  originality  when 
he  "leaves  it  to  your  generosity,"  though 
he  has  a  regular  tariff  for  his  local  patrons. 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR.  47 

He  does  not  dare  name  a  price  in  your 
case,  though  the  price  were  four  or  five 
times  above  his  usual  rate,  for  he  knows 
that  you  would  unhesitatingly  accept  his 
terms,  and  his  existence  would  be  forever 
blighted  by  the  reflection  that  he  might 
have  charged  you  more. 

These  things,  I  repeat,  cease  to  amaze 
one  after  a  while,  though  I  plead  guilty  to 
a  new  sensation  the  day  a  respectable  Vien- 
nese physician  left  it  to  my  generosity.  I 
attempted  to  reason  with  Herr  Doctor 
Scheister,  but  quite  futilely.  No,  it  was  so 
he  treated  princes  and  Americans.  It  was 
painful  to  see  a  member  of  a  noble  pro- 
fession, not  to  say  the  noblest,  placing  him- 
self on  a  level  with  grooms  and  barbers 
and  venders  of  orange-wood  walking-sticks. 
But  the  intelligent  Herr  Doctor  Scheister 
was  content  to  do  that. 

In  many  cities  the  street  beggar  is  under 
the  strict  surveillance  of  the  police;  yet 
there  is  no  spot  in  Europe  but  has  its 


48  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTff. 

empty  palm.  It  is  only  in  Italy,  however, 
that  pauperism  is  a  regular  branch  of  in- 
dustry. There  it  has  been  elevated  to  a 
fine  art.  Elsewhere  it  is  a  sordid,  clumsy 
make-shift,  with  no  joy  in  it.  It  falls 
short  of  being  a  gay  science  in  France  or 
Germany,  or  Austria  or  Hungary.  In  Scot- 
land it  is  depressing,  in  Spain  humiliating. 
In  Spain  the  beggar  is  loftily  condescend- 
ing ;  he  is  a  caballero,  a  man  of  sangre  azul, 
and  has  his  coat-of-arms,  though  he  may 
have  no  arms  to  his  coat,  caramba!  In 
order  to  shake  him  off  you  are  obliged  to 
concede  his  quality.  He  will  never  leave 
you  until  his  demand  is  complied  with,  or 
until  you  say,  "Brother,  for  the  love  of 
God,  excuse  me ! "  and  then  the  rogue  de- 
parts with  a  careless  "  God  go  with  you  !  " 
He  is  precisely  the  person  whom  you  would 
not  be  anxious  to  meet  in  a  deserted  calle 
after  nightfall,  or  by  daylight  in  a  pass  of 
the  Guadarrama.  The  guide-books  give 
disheartening  accounts  of  mendicancy  in 

' 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR.   49 

Ireland ;  but  that  must  be  in  the  interior. 
I  saw  nothing  of  it  along  the  coast,  at  Dub- 
lin and  Cork.  I  encountered  only  one  beg- 
gar in  Ireland,  at  Queenstown,  who  retired 
crest-fallen  when  I  informed  him  in  Eng- 
lish that  I  was  a  Frenchman  and  didn't 
understand  him. 

"  Thrue  for  ye,"  he  said  ;  "  bad  'cess  to 
me,  what  was  I  thinkin'  ov  !  " 

On  the  rising  and  falling  inflection  of 
that  brogue  I  returned  to  America  quite 
independently  of  a  Cunard  steamer.  I 
had  to  call  the  man  back  and  pay  my 
passage. 

In  England  you  are  subjected  to  a  dif- 
ferent kind  of  extortion.  There  are  beg- 
gars enough  and  to  spare  in  the  larger 
cities  ;  but  that  is  not  the  class  which  preys 
upon  you  in  Merrie  England.  It  is  the 
middle-aged  housekeeper,  the  smart  cham- 
bermaid, the  elegiac  waiter  and  his  assist- 
ant, the  boy  in  buttons  who  opens  the  hall 
door,  the  frowzy  subterranean  person  called 


50      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

Boots,  the  coachman,  the  ostler,  and  one  or 
two  other  individuals  whose  precise  rele- 
vancy to  your  affairs  will  always  remain 
a  pleasing  mystery  to  you,  but  who  never- 
theless stand  in  a  line  with  the  rest  in  the 
hall  of  the  wayside  inn,  at  your  departure, 
and  expect  a  gratuity.  They  each  look 
for  a  fee  ranging  from  two  to  ten  shillings 
sterling,  according  to  the  length  of  your 
sojourn,  though  a  very  magnificent  charge 
for  attendance  has  already  been  recorded 
in  your  bill,  which  appears  to  have  been 
drawn  up  by  an  amateur  mathematician  of 
somewhat  uncertain  touch  as  yet  in  the  in- 
tricate art  of  addition. 

The  English  cousin  of  the  American 
workingman,  who  would  feel  inclined  to 
knock  you  down  if  you  offered  him  money 
for  telling  you  the  time  of  day,  will  very 
placidly  pocket  a  fee  for  that  heavy  service. 
In  walking  the  streets  of  London  you 
never  get  over  your  astonishment  at  that 
eminently  respectable  person  in  black  — 


BEGGARS,  PROFESSIONAL  AND  AMATEUR.   51 

your  conjecture  makes  him  a  small  curate 
or  a  tutor  in  some  institution  of  learning  — 
who,  after  answering  your  trivial  question, 
takes  the  breath  out  of  you  by  suggesting 
his  willingness  to  drink  your  'ealth. 

On  the  whole,  I  am  not  certain  that 
I  do  not  prefer  the  graceful,  foliage-like, 
vagabond  ways  of  Pietro  and  Giuliana  to 
the  icy  mendicity  of  Jeemes. 


IV. 
WAYS  AND  MANNERS. 


IV. 

WAYS  AND  MANNERS. 

I  ONCE  asked  an  American  friend,  who 
had  spent  half  his  life  in  foreign  travel,  to 
tell  me  what  one  thing  most  impressed  him 
in  his  various  wanderings.  I  supposed  that 
he  was  going  to  say  the  Pyramids  or  the 
Kremlin  at  Moscow.  His  reply  was,  "  The 
politeness  and  consideration  I  have  met 
with  from  every  one  except  travelling  Eng- 
lishmen and  Americans." 

I  was  afterwards  told  by  an  impolite  per- 
son that  this  politeness  was  merely  a  sur- 
face polish  ;  but  it  is  a  singularly  agreeable 
sort  of  veneer.  Some  one  says  that  if  any 
of  us  were  peeled,  a  savage  would  be  found 
at  the  core.  It  is  a  very  great  merit,  then, 
to  have  this  savage  wrapped  in  numerous 
folds,  and  rendered  as  hard  to  peel  as  possi- 
ble. For  the  most  part,  the  pilgrim  abroad 


56      FROM  rONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

comes  in  contact  with  only  the  outside  of 
men  and  things.  The  main  point  is  gained 
if  that  outside  is  pleasant. 

The  American  at  home  enjoys  a  hundred 
conveniences  which  he  finds  wanting  in  the 
heart  of  European  civilization.  Many  mat- 
ters which  we  consider  as  necessities  here 
are  regarded  as  luxuries  there,  or  not  known 
at  all.  A  well-appointed  private  house  in 
an  American  city  has  perfections  in  the 
way  of  light,  heat,  water,  ventilation,  drain- 
age, etc.,  that  are  not  to  be  obtained  even 
in  palaces  abroad;  indeed,  a  palace  is  the 
last  place  in  which  they  are  to  be  looked  for. 
The  traveller  is  constantly  amused  by  the 
primitive  agricultural  implements  which  he 
sees  employed  in  some  parts  of  France, 
Italy,  and  Germany,  by  the  ingenuous  de- 
vices they  have  for  watering  the  streets  of 
their  grand  capitals,  and  by  the  strange  dis- 
regard of  economy  in  man-power  in  every- 
thing. A  water-cart  in  Berlin,  for  illustra- 
tion, requires  three  men  to  manage  it :  one 


U'AYS  A\D  .BANNERS.  57 

to  drive,  and  two  on  foot  behind  to  twitch 
right  and  left,  by  means  of  ropes,  a  short 
hose  with  a  sprinkler  at  the  end. 

''  I  wondered  what  they  would  be  at 
Under  the  lindens." 

This  painful  hose,  attached  to  a  chubby 
Teutonic-looking  barrel,  has  the  appearance 
of  being  the  tail  of  some  wretched  nonde- 
script animal,  whose  sufferings  would  in  our 
own  land  invoke  the  swift  interposition  of 
the  humane.  That  this  machine  is  wholly 
inadequate  to  the  simple  duty  of  sprinkling 
the  street  is  a  fact  not  perhaps  worth  men- 
tioning. The  culinary  utensils  of  Central 
Germany  are,  I  venture  to  say,  of  nearly 
the  same  pattern  as  those  used  by  Eve  — 
judging  by  some  earthenware  and  iron- 
mongery of  which  I  caught  a  glimpse  in 
the  kitchen  of  the  Rothe  Ross  at  Nurem- 
berg. I  saw  in  Tuscany  a  wheelbarrow 
that  must  have  been  an  infringement  of 
an  Egyptian  patent  of  500  B.  c.  I  forget  in 
what  imperial  city  it  was  I  beheld  a  tin 


58      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

bath-tub  shamelessly  allowing  itself  to  be 
borne  from  door  to  door  and  let  out  by  the 
job.  In  several  respects  the  United  States 
are  one  or  two  centuries  in  advance  of  the 
Old  World ;  but  in  that  little  matter  of  ve- 
neering I  have  mentioned,  we  are  very  far 
behind  her. 

The  incivility  which  greets  the  Amer- 
ican traveller  at  every  stage  in  his  own 
domains  is  so  rare  an  accomplishment 
among  foreign  railway,  steamboat,  and  ho- 
tel officials  that  it  is  possible  to  journey 
from  Dan  to  Beersheba  —  certainly  from 
Ponkapog  to  Pesth  —  without  meeting  a 
single  notable  instance  of  it.  I  think  that 
the  gentlemen  of  the  Dogana  at  Ventimi- 
glia  were  selected  expressly  on  account  of 
their  high  breeding  to  examine  luggage  at 
that  point.  In  France  —  by  France  I  mean 
Paris  —  even  the  drivers  of  the  public  car- 
riages are  civil.  Civilization  can  go  no 
further.  If  Darwin  is  correct  in  his  theory 
of  the  survival  of  the  fittest,  there  will 


WAYS  AND  MANNERS.  59 

ultimately  not  be  a  single  specimen  of  the 
genus  left  anywhere  in  America.  We  shall 
have  to  import  Parisians.  I  am  not  posi- 
tive but  we  shall  also  run  short  of  railway 
conductors  and  ticket-sellers.  We  have 
persons  occupying  these  posts  here  who 
could  not  hold  similar  positions  in  Europe 
fifteen  minutes. 

The  guard  who  has  charge  of  your  car- 
riage on  a  Continental  railway,  so  far  from 
being  the  disdainful  autocrat  who  on  our 
own  cars  too  often  snatches  your  ticket 
from  you  and  snubs  you  at  a  word,  is  the 
most  thoughtful  and  considerate  of  men; 
he  looks  after  the  welfare  and  comfort  of 
your  party  as  if  that  were  the  specialty  for 
which  he  was  created ;  he  never  loses  coun- 
tenance at  your  daring  French  or  German, 
or  the  graceful  New  England  accent  you 
throw  upon  your  Italian ;  he  is  ready  with 
the  name  of  that  ruined  castle  which  stands 
like  a  jagged  tooth  in  the  mouth  of  the 
mountain  gorge ;  he  does  not  neglect  to  tell 


60      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

you  at  what  station  you  may  find  an  excel- 
lent buffet;  you  cannot  weary  him  with 
questions ;  he  will  smilingly  answer  the 
same  one  a  hundred  times ;  and  when  he  is 
killed  in  a  collision  with  the  branch  train, 
you  are  not  afraid  to  think  where  he  will 
go,  with  all  this  kindliness. 

I  am  convinced  that  it  is  the  same  per- 
son, thinly  disguised  as  the  proprietor  of  a 
hotel,  who  receives  you  at  the  foot  of  the 
staircase  as  you  step  down  from  the  omni- 
bus, and  is  again  the  attentive  and  indefati- 
gable chamberlain  to  your  earthly  comfort. 
It  is  an  old  friend  who  has  been  waiting  for 
you  these  many  years.  To  be  sure,  as  the 
proprietor  of  a  hotel  the  old  friend  makes 
you  pay  roundly  for  all  this  ;  but  do  you  not 
pay  roundly  for  food  and  shelter  in  tav- 
erns on  your  native  heath,  and  get  no  civil- 
ity whatever,  unless  the  hotel-clerk  has  lost 
his  mind?  Your  Continental  inn-keeper, 
of  whatever  nationality,  keeps  a  paternal 
eye  on  you,  and  does  not  allow  you  to  be 


WAYS  AND  MANNERS.  61 

imposed  upon  by  rapacious  outsiders.  If 
you  are  to  be  imposed  upon,  he  attends  to 
that  trifling  formality  himself,  and  always 
graciously.  Across  three  thousand  miles  of 
sea  and  I  know  not  how  many  miles  of 
land,  I  touch  my  hat  at  this  moment  to  the 
landlord  of  that  snuffy  little  hostelry  at 
Wittenberg,  who  awoke  me  at  midnight  to 
excuse  himself  for  not  having  waited  upon 
us  in  person  when  we  arrived  by  the  ten 
o'clock  train.  He  had  had  a  card-party  — 
the  Herr  Professor  Something-splatz  and 
a  few  friends  —  in  the  coffee-room,  and 
really,  etc.,  etc.  He  could  n't  sleep,  and 
did  n't  let  me,  until  he  had  made  his  ex- 
cuses. It  was  downright  charming  in  you, 
mine  host  of  the  Goldner  Adler ;  I  thank 
you  for  it,  and  I  'd  thank  you  not  to  do  it 
again. 

Every  American  who  has  passed  a  week 
in  rural  England  must  have  carried  away, 
even  if  he  did  not  bring  with  him,  a  fond- 
ness for  our  former  possessions.  The  solid 


62  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

hospitality  he  has  received  at  the  comfort- 
able old  inns  smothered  in  leaves  and 
mosses  by  the  roadside  is  sure  to  figure 
among  his  pleasantest  reminiscences.  It  lies 
in  his  recollection  with  Stratford  and  Can- 
terbury and  Grasmere ;  as  he  thinks  of  it, 
it  takes  something  of  the  picturesqueness 
of  those  ivy-draped  abbeys  and  cathedrals 
which  went  so  far  to  satisfy  his  morbid 
appetite  for  everything  that  is  wrinkled 
and  demolished  in  the  way  of  architecture. 
It  was  Shenstone  who  said,  — 

"  Whoe'er  has  travelled  life's  dull  round, 
Whate'er  his  stages  may  have  been, 
May  sigh  to  think  he  still  has  found 
The  warmest  welcome  at  an  inn." 

The  foreign  traveller  will  scarcely  be  in- 
clined to  sigh  over  that.  If  he  is,  he  will 
have  cause  to  sigh  in  many  an  English  vil- 
lage and  in  most  of  the  leading  cities  across 
the  Channel.  I  know  of  one  party  that  can 
think  with  nothing  but  gratitude  of  their 
reception  at  the  hotel ,  one  raw  April 


WAYS  AND  MANNERS.  63 

night,  after  a  stormy  passage  from  Dover  to 
Calais  and  a  cheerless  railway  ride  thence 
to  Paris.  Rooms  had  been  bespoken  by  tel- 
egraph, and  when  the  wanderers  arrived  at 
the  Rue  de  Rivoli  they  found  such  exquisite 
preparation  for  their  coming  as  seemed  to 
have  been  made  by  well-known  gentle 
hands  reaching  across  the  Atlantic.  In  a 
small  salon  adjoining  the  parlor  assigned 
to  the  party,  the  wax  candles  threw  a  soft 
light  over  the  glass  and  silver  appoint- 
ments of  a  table  spread  for  their  repast.  A 
waiter  arranging  a  dish  of  fruit  at  the 
buffet  greeted  them  with  a  good  evening, 
as  if  he  had  been  their  servitor  for  years, 
instead  of  now  laying  eyes  upon  them 
for  the  first  time.  In  the  open  chimney- 
place  of  the  parlor  was  a  wood  fire  blazing 
cheerfully  on  the  backs  of  a  couple  of  brass 
griffins  who  did  not  seem  to  mind  it.  On 
the  mantel-piece  was  an  antique  clock, 
flanked  by  bronze  candlesticks  that  would 
have  taken  your  heart  in  a  bric-a-brac  shop. 


64  FROM  PONKAPOG    TO  PESTH. 

The  furniture,  the  draperies,  and  the  hun- 
dred and  one  nicknacks  lying  around  on 
tables  and  etageres,  showed  the  touch  of  a 
tasteful  woman's  hand.  It  might  have  been 
a  room  in  a  chateau.  It  was  as  unlike  as 
possible  to  those  gaudy  barracks  —  fitted 
up  at  so  much  per  yard  by  a  soulless  up- 
holsterer—  which  we  call  parlors  in  our 
own  hotels.  Beyond  this  were  the  sleeping 
apartments,  in  the  centre  of  one  of  which 
stood  the  neatest  of  femmes  de  charnbre, 
with  the  demurest  of  dark  eyes,  and  the 
pinkest  of  ribbons  on  her  cap.  She  held 
in  her  hand  a  small  copper  pitcher  of  hot 
water,  and  looked  like  Liotard's  pretty 
painting  of  the  Chocolate  Girl  come  to 
life.  On  a  toilette-table  under  a  draped 
mirror  was  a  slender  vase  of  Bohemian 
glass  holding  two  or  three  fresh  tea-roses. 
What  beau  of  the  old  regime  had  slipped 
out  of  his  sculptured  tomb  to  pay  madam 
that  gallantry  ? 

Outside  of  the  larger  cities  on  the  Con< 


WATS  AND  MANNERS.  65 

tinent  you  can  get  as  wretched  accommoda- 
tions as  you  could  desire  for  an  enemy.  In 
most  of  the  German  and  Italian  provinces, 
aside  from  the  main  routes  of  travel,  the 
inns  are  execrable ;  but  the  people  are  in- 
variably courteous.  I  hardly  know  how  to 
account  for  the  politeness  which  seems  to 
characterize  every  class  abroad.  Possibly 
it  is  partly  explained  by  the  military  sys- 
tem which  in  many  countries  requires  of 
each  man  a  certain  term  of  service ;  the 
soldier  is  disciplined  in  the  severest  school 
of  manners  ;  he  is  taught  to  treat  both  his 
superior  and  his  inferior  with  deference ; 
courtesy  becomes  second  nature.  Certainly 
it  is  the  rule,  and  not  the  exception,  among 
Continental  nations.  From  the  threshold 
of  a  broken-down  chalet  in  some  loneliest 
Alpine  pass  you  will  be  saluted  graciously. 
You  grow  skeptical  as  to  that  *'  rude  Carin- 
thian  boor  "  who,  in  Goldsmith's  poem, 

"  Against  the  houseless  stranger  shuts  the  door.  " 

No  French,  Italian,   or  Saxon  gentleman, 

5 


66  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

BO  far  as  I  have  observed,  enters  or  leaves 
a  caf £  of  the  better  class  without  lifting  his 
hat,  especially  if  there  are  ladies  present. 
As  he  hurries  from  the  railway  carriage  at 
his  station  —  a  station  at  which  the  train 
halts  for  perhaps  only  a  few  seconds  —  he 
seldom  neglects  to  turn  on  the  step  and  sa- 
lute his  fellow-passengers.  It  is  true,  for 
the  last  hour  or  two  he  sat  staring  over  the 
top  of  his  journal  at  your  wife  or  sister; 
but  to  be  a  breaker  of  the  female  heart  is 
what  they  all  seem  to  aspire  to,  over  there. 
It  appears  to  be  recognized  as  not  ill-bred 
to  stare  at  a  lady  so  long  as  there  is  any- 
thing left  of  her.  It  is  in  that  fashion  that 
American  ladies  are  stared  at  by  French- 
men and  Germans  and  Italians  and  Span- 
iards, who,  aside  from  this,  are  very  polite 
to  our  countrywomen  —  marvellously  polite 
when  we  reflect  that  the  generality  of  im- 
travelled  foreigners,  beyond  the  Straits  of 
Dover,  regard  us,  down  deep  in  their  hearts, 
&s  only  a  superior  race  of  barbarians. 


WAYS  AND  MANNERS.  67 

They  would  miss  us  sadly  if  we  were  to 
become  an  extinct  race.  Not  to  mention 
other  advantages  resulting  from  our  exist- 
ence, our  desire  to  behold  their  paintings 
and  statuary  and  the  marvels  of  their  archi- 
tecture —  to  which  they  themselves  are  for 
the  most  part  only  half  alive,  especially  in 
Italy  —  keeps  a  thousand  of  their  lovely, 
musty  old  towns  from  collapsing.  They 
understand  this  perfectly,  and  do  whatever 
lies  within  them  to  interest  us ;  they  are 
even  so  obliging  as  to  invent  tombs  and  his- 
toric localities  for  our  edification,  and  come 
at  last  to  believe  in  them  themselves.  In 
that  same  Wittenberg  of  which  I  have 
spoken,  they  will  show  you  the  house  of 
Hamlet !  and  at  Ferrara,  a  high-strung  sym- 
pathetic valet-de-place,  if  properly  encour- 
aged, will  throw  tears  into  his  voice  as  he 
stands  with  you  in  a  small  cellar  where 
by  no  chance  is  it  probable  that  Tasso  was 
immured  for  seven  years,  or  even  seven 
minutes.  Prigione  di  Tasso !  I  have  as 


68     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

genuine  a  prison  of  Tasso  at  Ponkapog. 
Though  their  opinion  of  our  intelligence  is 
not  always  as  flattering  as  we  could  wish, 
it  shall  not  prevent  me  from  saying  that 
these  people  are  the  most  charming  and 
courteous  people  on  the  globe,  and  that  I 
shall  forget  the  Madonna  at  Dresden,  the 
Venus  in  the  Louvre,  and  the  Alhambra 
as  I  saw  it  once  by  moonlight,  before  I  for- 
get an  interview  I  witnessed  one  day  in 
the  Rue  de  1'llcole  de  Medecine,  between 
a  fat,  red-faced  concierge  and  a  very  much 
battered  elderly  French  gentleman,  whose 
redingote,  buttoned  closely  up  to  his  chin, 
threw  vague  but  still  damaging  suspicions 
on  his  supply  of  linen. 

"  Pardon,  madame,"  said  the  decayed  old 
gentleman,  lifting  his  threadbare  silk  hat 
by  its  curled  brim  with  indescribable  grace 
as  he  approached,  "  is  M.  .  .  .  within  ?  " 

"  I  think  not,  but  I  will  see." 

"  I  am  pained  "  (Je  suis  desole~)  "  to  give 
you  the  trouble." 


WAYS  AND  MANNERS.  69 

"  It  is  no  trouble,  monsieur." 

"  Merci,  madame." 

The  concierge  disappeared.  Presently 
ehe  returned,  loaded  to  the  muzzle  with  the 
information  that  M.  .  .  .  was  unfortunately 
not  at  home. 

"  A  thousand  pardons,  madame,  but  will 
you  have  the  amiability  to  give  him  this  " 
(presenting  a  card  that  had  seen  better 
days)  "  as  soon  as  he  returns  ?  " 

"  Certainly,  monsieur." 

"Madame,  I  am  sensible  of  your  kind- 
ness." 

"  Do  not  speak  of  it." 

"  Bonjour,  madame." 

"  Bonjour,  monsieur." 

This  poor  gentleman's  costume  was  very 
far  on  its  way  to  a  paper-mill ;  but  adver- 
sity had  left  his  manners  intact,  and  they 
were  fit  for  palaces. 


v. 

A  VISIT  TO  A  CERTAIN  OLD 
GENTLEMAN. 


V. 

A  VISIT  TO  A  CEETAIN  OLD  GENTLEMAN. 
L 

IT  was  only  after  the  gravest  considera- 
tion that  we  decided  to  visit  a  Certain  Old 
Gentleman.  There  were  so  many  points 
to  be  considered.  It  was  by  no  means  cer- 
tain that  a  Certain  Old  Gentleman  wanted 
us  to  visit  him.  Though  we  knew  him,  in 
a  vague  way,  to  be  sure  —  through  friends 
of  ours  who  were  friends  of  his  —  he  did 
not  know  us  at  all.  Then  he  was,  accord- 
ing to  report,  a  very  particular  old  gentle- 
man, standing  squarely  on  his  dignity,  and 
so  hedged  about  by  conventional  ideas  of 
social  etiquette,  so  difficult  of  approach,  and 
so  nearly  impossible  to  become  acquainted 
with  when  approached,  that  it  was  an  au- 
dacious thing  seriously  to  contemplate  drop- 


74  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ping  in  on  him  familiarly.  What  impelled 
us  to  wish  to  do  so  ?  Certainly  we  had  no 
desire  to  pay  court  to  him.  He  had  for- 
merly occupied  a  high  official  position,  but 
now  he  was  retired,  in  a  manner,  into  pri- 
vate life  —  a  sufficient  reason  in  itself  why 
he  should  be  let  alone.  In  brief,  there 
were  a  hundred  reasons  why  we  should  not 
visit  him,  and  there  was  not  one  why  we 
should.  It  was  that  that  decided  us,  I 
think. 

It  comes  back  to  me  like  the  reminis- 
cence of  a  dream,  rather  than  as  the  mem- 
ory of  an  actual  experience,  that  May  after- 
noon when  the  purpose  first  unfolded  itself 
to  us.  We  were  sitting  in  the  fading  glow 
of  the  day  on  the  last  of  the  four  marble 
steps  which  linked  our  parlor  to  the  fairy- 
like  garden  of  the  Albergo  di  Russia  in 
the  Via  Babuino.  Our  rooms  were  on  the 
ground-floor,  and  this  garden,  shut  in  on 
three  sides  by  the  main  building  and  the 
wings  of  the  hotel,  and  closed  at  the  rear 


A   VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.        75 

by  the  Pincian  Hill,  up  which  the  garden 
clambered  half-way  in  three  or  four  luxu- 
riant terraces,  seemed  naturally  to  belong 
to  our  suite  of  apartments.  All  night  we 
could  hear  the  drip  of  the  fountain  among 
the  cactus  leaves,  and  catch  at  intervals  the 
fragrance  of  orange-blooms,  blown  in  at  the 
one  window  we  dared  leave  open.  It  was 
here  we  took  the  morning  air  a  few  min- 
utes before  breakfast ;  it  was  on  these  steps 
we  smoked  our  cigar  after  the  wonders  of 
the  day  were  done.  We  had  the  garden 
quite  to  ourselves,  for  the  cautious  tourist 
had  long  since  taken  wing  from  Rome, 
frightened  by  the  early  advance  of  sum- 
mer. The  great  caravansary  was  nearly 
empty.  Aside  from  the  lizards,  I  do  not 
recollect  seeing  any  living  creature  in  that 
garden  during  our  stay,  except  a  little 
frowsy  wad  of  a  dog,  which  dashed  into  our 
premises  one  morning,  and  seizing  on  a 
large  piece  of  sponge  made  off  with  it  up 
the  Pincian  Hill.  If  that  sponge  fell  to 


76      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  lot  of  some  time-encrusted  Romanese, 
and  Providence  was  merciful  enough  to  in- 
spire him  with  a  conception  of  its  proper 
use,  it  cannot  be  said  of  the  little  Skye  ter- 
rier that  he  lived  in  vain. 

If  no  other  feet  than  ours  invaded  those 
neatly-gravelled  walks,  causing  the  shy,  sil- 
very lizards  to  retreat  swiftly  to  the  bor- 
ders of  the  flower-beds  or  behind  the  cor- 
pulent green  tubs  holding  the  fan-palms, 
we  were  keenly  conscious  now  and  then  of 
being  overlooked.  On  pleasant  afternoons 
lines  of  carriages  and  groups  of  gayly- 
dressed  people  went  winding  up  the  steep 
road  which,  skirted  with  ilexes  and  pines 
and  mimosa  bushes,  leads  to  the  popular 
promenade  of  the  Pincio.  There,  if  any- 
where, you  get  a  breath  of  fresh  air  in  the 
lieated  term,  and  always  the  most  magnifi- 
cent view  of  the  city  and  its  environs. 
There,  of  old,  were  the  gardens  of  Lucul- 
lus  ;  there  Messalina,  with  sinful  good  taste, 
had  her  pleasure-house,  and  held  her  Satur- 


'A   VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.        77 

nalia ;  and  there,  to-day,  the  band  of  Vic- 
tor Emmanuel  plays  twice  a  week  in  the 
sunset,  luring  thither  all  the  sunny  belles 
and  beaux  of  Rome.  Monte  Pincio,  as  I 
have  said,  sloped  down  on  one  side  to  our 
garden.  On  the  crest  of  the  hill  command- 
ing our  demesne  was  a  low  wall  of  masonry. 
From  time  to  time  a  killing  Roman  fop 
would  come  and  lean  in  an  elegant  attitude 
against  this  wall,  nursing  himself  on  the 
ivory  ball  of  his  cane,  and  staring  unblush- 
ingly  at  the  blonde-haired  lady  sitting  un- 
der her  own  hired  fig-tree  in  the  hotel  gar- 
den. What  a  fascinating  creature  he  was, 
with  his  little  black  mustache,  almost  as 
heavy  as  a  pencil  mark,  his  olive  skin,  his 
wide,  effeminate  eyes,  his  slender  rattan 
figure,  and  his  cameo  sleeve-studs  !  What 
a  sad  dog  he  was,  to  melt  into  those  lan- 
guishing postures  up  there,  and  let  loose 
all  those  facile  blandishments,  careless  of 
the  heart-break  he  must  inevitably  cause 
the  simple  American  signora  in  the  gar- 


78  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTR 

den  below  !  We  used  to  glance  up  at  this 
gilded  youth  from  time  to  time,  and  it  was 
a  satisfaction  to  reflect  what  an  ineffable 
idiot  he  was,  like  all  his  kind  in  every  land 
under  the  sun. 

This  was  our  second  sojourn  in  Rome, 
and  we  had  spent  two  industrious  weeks, 
picking  up  the  threads  of  the  Past,  dropped 
temporarily  in  April  in  order  to  run  down 
and  explore  Naples  before  Southern  Italy 
became  too  hot  to  hold  us :  two  busy  weeks, 
into  which  were  crowded  visits  to  the  cata- 
combs and  the  Baths  of  Caracalla,  and  ex- 
cursions on  the  Campagna  —  at  this  time 
of  year  a  vast  red  sea  of  poppies  strewn 
with  the  wrecks  of  ancient  tombs ;  we  had 
humiliated  our  nostrils  in  strolling  through 
the  Ghetto,  and  gladdened  our  eyes  daily 
with  the  bronze  equestrian  statue  of  Mar- 
cus Aurelius  in  the  Piazza  del  Campido- 
glio ;  we  had  made  a  pilgrimage  to  the  Ab- 
bey alle  Tre  Fontane,  and  regarded  with 
a  proper  sense  of  awe  the  three  fountains 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.       79 

which  had  gushed  forth  at  the  points  where 
the  head  of  the  Apostle  Paul  landed,  in 
those  three  eccentric  leaps  it  accomplished 
after  his  execution ;  we  had  breathed  the 
musky  air  of  Santa  Maria  Maggiore  and  the 
Basilica  San  Paolo,  and  once,  by  chance, 
on  a  minor  fete  day,  lighted  on  a  pretty 
pageant  in  St.  John  Lateran ;  we  had 
looked  our  fill  of  statuary  and  painting, 
and  jasper  and  lapis-lazuli ;  we  had  bur- 
rowed under  the  Eternal  City  in  crypt  and 
dungeon,  and  gazed  down  upon  it  from  the 
dizzy  Lantern  of  St.  Peter's.  The  blight- 
ing summer  was  at  hand ;  the  phantasmal 
malaria  was  stalking  the  Campagna  at 
night :  it  was  time  to  go.  There  was  noth- 
ing more  to  be  done  in  Rome  unless  we  did 
the  Roman  fever  —  nothing  but  that,  in^ 
deed,  if  we  were  not  inclined  to  pay  a  visit 
to  a  Certain  Old  Gentleman.  This  alter- 
native appeared  to  have  so  many  advan- 
tages over  the  Roman  fever  that  it  at  once 
took  the  shape  of  an  irresistible  temptation. 


80     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

At  least  it  did  to  Madama  and  me,  but  the 
other  pilgrim  of  the  party  was  of  a  more 
reflective  mind,  and  was  disposed  to  look  at 
the  question  judicially.  He  was  not  going 
to  call  on  a  Certain  Old  Gentleman  as  if 
he  were  a  frescoed  panel  in  the  Sistine 
Chapel ;  it  was  not  fair  to  put  a  human  be- 
ing on  the  •  same  footing  as  a  nameless 
heathen  statue  dug  out  of  the  cinders  of 
Pompeii ;  the  statue  could  not  complain, 
and  would  be  quite  in  the  wrong  if  it  did 
complain,  at  being  treated  as  a  curiosity; 
but  the  human  being  might,  and  had  a  per- 
fect right  to  protest.  H 's  objections  to 

the  visit  were  so  numerous  and  so  warmly 
put,  that  Madama  and  I  were  satisfied  that 
he  had  made  up  his  mind  to  go. 

"  However,  the  gentleman  is  not  adverse 
to  receiving  strangers,  as  I  understand  it," 
said  H ,  imperceptibly  weakening. 

"  On  the  contrary,"  I  said,  "  it  is  one  of 
the  relaxations  of  his  old  age,  and  he  is  es* 
pecially  hospitable  to  our  countrymen.  A 
great  many  Americans  "  — 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.       81 

"  Then  let  us  go,  by  all  means,"  inter- 
rupted Madama.  "Among  the  Romans 
one  should  do  —  as  Americans  do." 

"Only  much  better,"  I  suggested.  "I 
have  sometimes  been  not  proud  of  my  coun- 
trymen on  this  side  of  the  water.  The  De- 
laneys  in  the  Borghese  Gallery,  the  other 
day !  I  almost  longed  for  the  intervention 
of  the  Inquisition.  If  it  had  been  in  Ven- 
ice and  in  the  fifteenth  century,  I  'd  have 
dropped  an  anonymous  communication  into 
the  letter-box  of  the  Palace  of  the  Doges, 
and  had  the  Council  of  Ten  down  on  Miss 
Fanny  Delaney  in  no  time." 

"  The  chances  are  he  is  out  of  town," 
said  Madama,  ignoring  my  vindictiveness. 

"  He  has  a  summer  residence  near  Al- 

bano,"  said  H ,  "but  he  never  goes 

there  now ;  at  least  he  has  not  occupied  the 
villa  for  the  last  few  years,  in  fact,  not 
since  18YO." 

"Where    does    he    pass    his    summers, 

then?"  asked  Madama. 
6 


82  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

"  In  Rome." 

"  How  eccentric !  " 

"  I  suppose  he  has  his  weak  points,  like 
the  rest  of  us,"  said  H ,  charitably. 

"  He  ought  to  have  his  strong  points,  to 
endure  the  summer  in  Rome,  with  the  ma- 
laria, and  the  sirocco,  and  the  typhoon,  and 
all  the  dreadful  things  that  befall." 

"  The  typhoon,  my  dear  "  — 

Though  the  discussion  did  not  end  here 
that  May  evening  on  the  steps  of  the  hotel- 
garden,  it  ends  here  in  my  record  ;  it  being 
sufficient  for  the  reader  to  know  that  we 
then  and  there  resolved  to  undertake  the 
visit  in  question.  The  scribe  of  the  party 
dispatched  a  note  to  Signer  V express- 
ing a  desire  to  pay  our  respects  to  his  ven- 
erable friend  before  we  left  town,  and  beg. 
ging  that  an  early  day,  if  any,  be  appointed 

for  the  interview.  Signor  V was  an 

Italian  acquaintance  of  ours  who  carried  a 
diplomatic  key  that  fitted  almost  any  lock. 

We  breakfasted  betimes,  the  next  morn- 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.        83 

ing,  and  sat  lingering  over  our  coffee,  await- 
ing Signer  V 's  reply  to  our  note.  The 

reply  had  so  impressive  an  air  of  not  com- 
ing, that  we  fell  to  planning  an  excursion 
to  Tivoli,  and  had  ordered  a  carriage  to 
that  end,  when  Stefano  appeared,  bearing 
an  envelope  on  his  silver-plated  waiter.  (I 
think  Stefano  was  born  with  that  waiter  in 
his  hand ;  he  never  laid  it  down  for  a  mo- 
ment ;  if  any  duty  obliged  him  to  use  both 
hands,  he  clapped  the  waiter  under  his  arm 
or  between  his  knees  ;  I  used  to  fancy  that 
it  was  attached  to  his  body  by  some  myste- 
rious, invisible  ligament,  the  severing  of 
which  would  have  caused  his  instant  disso- 
lution.) Signer  V advised  us  that  his 

venerable  friend  would  be  gracious  enough 
to  receive  us  that  very  day  at  one  half-hour 
after  noon.  In  a  postscript  the  signer  in- 
timated that  the  gentlemen  would  be  ex- 
pected to  wear  evening  dress,  minus  gloves, 
and  that  it  was  imperative  on  the  part  of 
Madama  to  be  costumed  completely  in 


84      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTB. 

black  and  to  wear  only  a  black  veil  on  her 
hair.  Such  was  one  of  the  whims  of  a  Cer- 
tain Old  Gentleman. 

Here  a  dilemma  arose.  Among  Ma- 
dama's  wardrobe  there  was  no  costume  of 
this  lugubrious  description.  The  nearest 
approach  to  it  was  a  statuesque  black  robe, 
elaborately  looped  and  covered  with  agree- 
able arabesques  of  turquoise -blue  silk. 
There  was  nothing  to  do  but  to  rip  off 
these  celestial  trimmings,  and  they  were 
ripped  off,  though  it  went  against  the  wo- 
man-heart. Poor,  vain  little  silk  dress, 
that  had  never  been  worn,  what  swift  ret- 
ribution overtook  you  for  being  nothing 
but  artistic,  and  graceful,  and  lovely,  and 
—  Parisian,  which  includes  all  blessed  ad- 
jectives ! 

From  the  bottom  of  a  trunk  in  which 

they  had  lain  since  we  left  London,  H 

and  I  exhumed  our  dress-coats.  Though 
perfectly  new  (like  their  amiable  sister,  the 
black  silk  gown),  they  came  out  looking 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.        85 

remarkably  aged.  They  had  inexplicable 
bulges  in  the  back,  as  if  they  had  been 
worn  by  somebody  with  six  or  eight  shoul- 
der-blades, and  were  covered  all  over  in 
front  with  minute  wrinkles,  recalling  the 
famous  portrait  of  the  late  Mr.  Parr  in  his 

hundred  and  fiftieth   year.     H and  I 

got  into  our  creased  elegance  with  not 
more  intemperate  comment  than  might  be 
pardoned,  and  repaired  to  the  parlor,  where 
we  found  Madama  arranging  a  voluminous 
veil  of  inky  crape  over  her  hair,  and  re- 
garding herself  in  a  full-length  mirror  with 
gloomy  satisfaction.  The  carriage  was  at 
the  porte  cochere,  and  we  departed,  stealing 
silently  through  the  deserted  hotel  corridor, 
and  looking  for  all  the  world,  I  imagine, 
like  a  couple  of  rascally  undertakers  mak- 
ing off  with  a  nun. 


86     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 


n. 


WE  had  been  so  expeditious  in  our  prep- 
arations that  on  seating  ourselves  in  the 
carriage  we  found  much  superfluous  time 
on  our  hands ;  so  we  went  around  Robin 
Hood's  barn  to  our  destination  —  a  delight- 
ful method  in  Rome  —  taking  the  Cenci 
Palace  and  the  Hilda's  Tower  of  Haw- 
thorne's romance  in  our  impartial  sweep, 
and  stopping  at  a  shop  in  the  Piazza  di 
Spagna,  where  Madama  purchased  an  am- 
ber rosary  for  only  about  three  times  as 
many  lire  as  she  need  have  paid  for  it  any- 
where else  on  the  globe.  If  an  Italian  shop- 
keeper should  be  submitted  to  a  chemical 
analysis,  and  his  rascality  carefully  sepa- 
rated from  the  other  ingredients  and  thrown 
away,  there  would  be  nothing  left  of  him. 
I  think  it  is  Dumas  fih  who  remarks  that 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.        87 

the  ancients  had  but  one  god  for  shop- 
keepers and  thieves. 

There  were  not  many  persons  to  be  seen 
in  the  streets.  It  was  nearing  the  hour 
when  Rome  keeps  in-doors  and  takes  its 
ease ;  besides,  it  was  out  of  season,  as  I 
have  stated,  and  the  Gaul  and  the  Briton, 
and  the  American  savage  with  his  bowie- 
knife  and  revolver,  had  struck  a  trail  north- 
ward. At  the  church  portals,  to  be  sure, 
was  the  usual  percentage  of  distressing  beg- 
gars—  the  old  hag  out  of  Macbeth,  who 
insists  on  lifting  the  padded  leather  door- 
screen,  for  you,  the  one-eyed  man,  the  one- 
armed  man,  the  one-legged  man,  and  other 
fragments.  The  poor  you  have  always  with 
you,  in  Italy.  They  lash  themselves,  meta- 
phorically, to  the  spokes  of  your  carriage- 
wheel,  and  go  round  with  you. 

Ever  since  our  second  arrival  in  Rome 
the  population  seemed  to  have  been  under- 
going a  process  of  evaporation.  From  the 
carriage-window  we  now  and  then  caught 


88  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

sight  of  a  sandalled  monk  flitting  by  in  the 
shadow  of  a  tall  building  —  the  sole  human 
thing  that  appears  to  be  in  a  hurry  in  this 
stagnant  city.  His  furtive  air  betrays  his 
consciousness  that  he  is  only  tolerated  where 
he  once  ruled  nearly  supreme.  It  is  an  evil 
time  for  him  ;  his  tenure  is  brief.  Now 
that  the  government  has  unearthed  him,  he 
is  fading  out  like  a  Pompeian  fresco.  As 
he  glides  by,  there  in  the  shade,  with  the 
aspect  of  a  man  belated  on  some  errand  of 
vital  import,  I  have  an  idea  he  is  not  going 
anywhere  in  particular.  Before  these  dole- 
ful days  had  befallen  the  Church  of  Rome, 
every  third  figure  you  met  was  a  gray- 
cowled  friar,  or  a  white-robed  Dominican, 
or  a  shovel-hatted  reverend  father  looking 
like  a  sharp  raven;  but  they  all  are  rare 
birds  now,  and,  for  the  most  part,  the  few 
that  are  left  stick  to  their  perches  in  the 
stricken,  mouldy  old  monasteries  and  con- 
vents, shedding  their  feathers  and  wasting 
away  hour  by  hour,  the  last  of  the  brood ! 


A    VISIT   TO  AN   OLD   GENTLEMAN.        89 

In  the  vicinity  of  Trajan's  Column  we 
encountered  a  bewildered-looking  goat-herd, 
who  had  strayed  in  from  the  Campagna, 
perhaps  with  some  misty  anticipation  that 
the  Emperor  Nero  had  a  fresh  lot  of  choice 
Christians  to  be  served  up  that  day  in  the 
arena  of  the  Coliseum.  I  wondered  if  this 
rustic  wore  those  pieces  of  hairy  goatskin 
laced  to  his  calves  in  July  and  August.  It 
threw  one  into  a  perspiration  to  look  at 
him.  But  I  forgave  him  on  inspection,  for 
with  his  pointed  hat,  through  an  aperture 
of  which  his  hair  had  run  to  seed,  and  his 
scarlet  sash,  and  his  many-colored  tattered 
habiliments,  he  was  the  only  bit  of  pic- 
turesque costume  we  saw  in  Rome.  Pic- 
turesque costume  is  a  thing  of  the  past 
there,  except  those  fraudulent  remains  of 
it  that  hang  about  the  studios  in  the  Via 
Margutta,  or  at  the  steps  of  the  Trinita  de' 
Monti,  on  the  shoulders  of  professional 
models. 

Even  the  Corso  was  nearly  deserted  and 


90      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

quite  dull  this  day,  and  it  is  scarcely  gay 
when  it  is  thronged,  as  we  saw  it  early 
in  the  spring.  Possibly  it  is  lively  during 
the  Carnival.  It  would  need  masking  and 
music  and  illumination  to  lift  its  gloom,  in 
spite  of  its  thousand  balconies.  The  sense 
of  antiquity  and  the  heavy,  uncompromis- 
ing architecture  of  Rome  oppress  one  pain- 
fully until  one  comes  to  love  her.  My  im- 
pression of  Rome  is  something  so  solid  and 
tangible  that  I  have  felt  at  times  as  if  I 
could  pack  it  in  a  box,  like  a  bas-relief,  or 
a  statue,  or  a  segment  of  a  column,  and 
send  it  home  by  the  Cunard  line.  Com- 
pared with  the  airiness  and  grace  and  color 
of  other  Continental  cities,  Rome  is  dull. 
The  arcades  of  Bologna  and  the  dingy 
streets  of  Verona  and  Padua  are  not  duller. 
If  I  linger  by  the  way,  and  seem  in  no 
haste  to  get  to  a  Certain  Old  Gentleman, 
it  is  because  the  Roman  atmosphere  has  in 
it  some  medicinal  property  that  induces 
reverie  and  procrastination,  and  relaxes  the 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.       91 

sinews  of  effort.  I  wonder  where  Caligula 
found  the  enterprise  to  torture  his  victims, 
and  Brutus  the  vivacity  to  stab  Csesar. 

Our  zigzag  route  brought  us  back  to  the 
Piazza  del  Popolo,  from  which  we  turned 
into  the  Via  Ripetta  on  the  left,  and  rat- 
tled over  the  stone  pavement  past  the  Cas- 
tle of  St.  Angelo,  towards  St.  Peter's.  It 
was  not  until  the  horses  slackened  their 
speed,  and  finally  stood  still  in  a  spacious 
cortile  at  the  foot  of  a  wide  flight  of  stone 
steps,  that  our  purpose  dropped  a  certain 
fantastic  aspect  it  had  worn,  and  became  a 
serious  if  not  a  solemn  business.  Notwith- 
standing our  deliberations  over  the  matter 
at  the  hotel,  I  think  I  had  not  fully  real- 
ized that  in  proposing  to  visit  a  Certain 
Old  Gentleman  we  were  proposing  to  visit 
the  Pope  of  Rome.1  The  proposition  had 
seemed  all  along  like  a  piece  of  mild  pleas- 

1  Since  this  paper  was  written,  Pius  IX.,  Cardinal  Anto- 
nelli,  and  King  Victor  Emmanuel  have  laid  down  the  burden 
of  life.  These  distinguished  personages  seem  to  have  con- 
spired to  render  my  note-book  obsolete. 


92      FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

antry,  as  if  one  should  say,  "I  think  I'll 
drop  round  on  Titus  Flavins  in  the  course 
of  the  forenoon,"  or  "  I  Ve  half  a  mind  to 
look  in  on  Cicero  and  Pompey,  and  see 
how  they  feel  this  morning  after  their  little 
dissipation  last  night  at  the  villa  of  Lucul- 
lus."  The  Pope  of  Rome  —  not  the  Pope 
regnant,  but  the  Pope  of  Rome  in  the  ab- 
stract —  had  up  to  that  hour  presented 
himself  to  my  mental  eye  as  an  august 
spectacular  figure-head,  belonging  to  no 
particular  period,  who  might  turn  out  after 
all  to  be  an  ingenious  historical  fiction  per- 
petrated by  the  same  humorist  that  in- 
vented Pocahontas.  The  Pope  of  Rome ! 
—  he  had  been  as  vague  to  me  as  Adam 
and  as  improbable  as  Noah. 

But  there  stood  Signer  V at  the  car- 
riage-step, waiting  to  conduct  us  into  the 
Vatican,  and  there,  on  either  side  of  the 
portals  at  the  head  of  the  massive  stair- 
ease,  lounged  two  of  the  papal  guard  in  that 
jack  -  of  -  diamonds  costume  which  Michael 


A   VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.       93 

Angelo  designed  for  them  —  in  the  way  of 
a  practical  joke,  I  fancy.  They  held  hal- 
berds in  their  hands,  these  mediaeval  gentle- 
men, and  it  was  a  mercy  they  did  n't  chop 
us  to  pieces  as  we  passed  between  them. 
What  an  absurd  uniform  for  a  man-at-arms 
of  the  nineteenth  century  !  These  fellows, 
clad  in  rainbow,  suggested  a  pair  of  harle- 
quins out  of  a  Christmas  pantomime.  Far- 
ther on  we  came  to  more  stone  staircase, 
and  more  stupid  papal  guard  with  melodra- 
matic battle-axes,  and  were  finally  ushered 
into  a  vast,  high -studded  chamber  at  the 
end  of  a  much-stuccoed  corridor. 

Coming  as  we  did  out  of  the  blinding 
sunshine,  this  chamber  seemed  to  us  at  first 
but  a  gloomy  cavern.  It  was  so  poorly 
lighted  by  numerous  large  windows  on  the 
western  side  that  several  seconds  elapsed 
before  we  could  see  anything  distinctly. 
One  or  two  additional  windows  would  have 
made  it  quite  dark.  At  the  end  of  the 
apartment,  near  the  door  at  which  we  had 


94     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

entered,  was  a  dais  with  three  tawdry  ro- 
coco gilt  arm-chairs,  having  for  background 
an  enormous  painting  of  the  Virgin,  but 
by  what  master  I  was  unable  to  make  out. 
The  draperies  of  the  room  were  of  some 
heavy  dark  stuff,  a  green  rep,  if  I  remem- 
ber, and  the  floor  was  covered  with  a  thick 
carpet  through  which  the  solid  stone  flag- 
ging beneath  repelled  the  pressure  of  your 
foot.  There  was  a  singular  absence  of 
color  everywhere,  of  that  mosaic  work  and 
Renaissance  gilding  with  which  the  eyes 
soon  become  good  friends  in  Italy.  The 
frescoes  of  the  ceiling,  if  there  were  any 
frescoes,  were  in  some  shy  neutral  tint,  and 
did  not  introduce  themselves  to  us.  On 
the  right,  at  the  other  extremity  of  the 
room,  was  a  double  door,  which  led,  as  we 
were  correct  in  supposing,  to  the  private 
apartments  of  the  Pope. 

Presently  our  eyes  grew  reconciled  to  the 
semi-twilight,  which  seemed  to  have  been 
transported  hither  with  a  faint  spicy  odor 


A   VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.       95 

of  incense  from  some  ancient  basilica  —  a 
proper  enough  light  for  an  audience-chain^ 
ber  in  the  Vatican.  Fixed  against  the  wall 
on  either  side,  and  extending  nearly  the 
entire  length  of  the  room,  was  a  broad  set- 
tee, the  greater  part  of  which  was  already 
occupied  when  we  entered.  Formerly  wo- 
men were  not  allowed  a  public  audience 
with  the  Pope.  Madame  Junot,  in  giving 
in  her  Me'moires  an  account  of  her  inter- 
view with  Pius  VII.,  says :  "  Whenever  a 
woman  is  presented  to  the  Pope,  it  must  be 
so  managed  as  to  have  the  appearance  of 
accident.  Women  are  not  admitted  into 
the  Vatican,  but  his  Holiness  permits  them 
to  be  presented  to  him  in  the  Sistine 
Chapel,  or  in  his  promenades.  But  the 
meeting  must  always  appear  to  be  the  ef- 
fect of  chance."  I  do  not  know  when  this 
custom  fell  into  desuetude;  possibly  long 
before  the  reign  of  Pius  IX.  The  major- 
ity of  the  persons  now  present  were  wo- 
men. 


96     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

Signer  V stationed  himself   at   our 

side,  and  began  a  conversation  with  H 

on  the  troubles  that  had  overtaken  and  the 
perils  that  still  menaced  the  True  Church. 
The  disintegration  of  nunneries  and  monas- 
teries and  the  closing  up  of  religious  houses 
had  been  fraught  with  much  individual 
suffering.  Hundreds  of  simple,  learned 
men  had  been  suddenly  thrust  out  into  a 
world  of  which  they  had  no  knowledge  and 
where  they  were  as  helpless  as  so  many  in- 
fants. In  some  instances  the  government 
had  laid  hands  on  strictly  private  proper- 
ties, on  funds  contributed  by  private  per- 
sons to  establish  asylums  for  women  of 
noble  birth  in  reduced  circumstances  — 
portionless  daughters  and  cousins  desirous 
of  leading  a  life  of  pious  meditation  and 
seclusion.  Many  of  these  institutions  pos- 
sessed enormous  revenues,  and  were  strong 
temptations  to  the  Italian  government, 
whose  money-chest  gave  out  a  pathetically 
hollow  sound  when  tapped  against  in  1870. 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.       97 

One  does  not  need  to  be  a  Catholic  to  per- 
ceive the  injustice  of  this  kind  of  seizure ; 
one's  sympathy  may  go  forth  with  the  un- 
housed nuns :  as  to  the  monks  —  it  does 
not  hurt  any  man  to  earn  his  own  living. 
The  right  and  the  necessity  to  work  ought 
to  be  regarded  as  a  direct  blessing  from 
God  by  men  who,  for  these  many  centuries, 
have  had  their  stomachs  "  with  good  capon 
lined,"  chiefly  at  the  expense  of  the  poor. 

Conversation  had  become  general ;  every 
one  spoke  in  a  subdued  tone,  and  a  bee-like 
hum  rose  and  fell  on  the  air.  With  the 
exception  of  a  neat  little  body,  with  her 
husband,  at  our  right,  the  thirty  or  forty 
persons  present  were  either  French,  Ger- 
man, English,  Russian,  or  Italian. 

I  remarked  to  Signor  V on  the  ab- 
sence of  the  American  element,  and  attrib- 
uted it  to  the  lateness  of  the  season. 

"  That  does  not  wholly  explain  it,"  said 

Signor  V .  "There  were  numberless 

applications  from  Americans  to  attend  this 
7 


98  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

reception,  but  his  Holiness  just  at  present 
is  not  inclined  to  receive  many  Ameri- 
cans." 

"Why  not?'* 

"  A  few  weeks  ago,  his  Holiness  was 
treated  with  great  disrespect  by  an  Ameri- 
can, a  lawyer  from  one  of  your  Western 
States,  I  believe,  who  did  not  rise  from  his 
seat  or  kneel  when  the  Pope  entered  the 
room." 

"  He  ought  to  have  risen,  certainly ;  but 
is  it  imperative  that  one  should  kneel  ?  " 

"  It  is ;  but  then,  it  is  not  imperative  on 
any  one  to  be  presented  to  his  Holiness. 
If  the  gentleman  did  not  wish  to  conform 
to  the  custom,  he  ought  to  have  stayed 
away." 

"He  might  have  been  ignorant  of  that 
phase  of  the  ceremony,"  said  I,  with  a  sud- 
den poignant  sense  of  sympathy  with  my 
unhappy  countryman.  "  What  befell  him  ?  " 

"  He  was  courteously  escorted  from  the 
chamber  by  the  gentleman  in  waiting," 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.       99 

said  Signer  V ,  glancing  at  an  official 

near  the  door,  who  looked  as  if  he  were  a 
cross  between  a  divinity  student  and  a  po- 
liceman. 

It  occurred  to  me  that  few  things  would 
be  less  entertaining  than  to  be  led  out  of 
this  audience-chamber  in  the  face  and  eyes 
of  France,  Germany,  Russia,  and  Italy  — 
in  the  face  and  eyes  of  the  civilized  world,  , 
in  fact ;  for  would  not  the  next  number  of 
Galignani's  Messenger  have  a  paragraph 
about  it  ?  I  had  supposed  that  Catholics 
knelt  to  the  Pope,  as  a  matter  of  course, 
but  that  Protestants  were  exempt  from  pay- 
ing this  homage,  on  the  same  ground  that 
Quakers  are  not  expected  to  remove  their 
hats  like  other  folk.  I  wondered  what 
Friend  Eli  would  do,  if  destiny  dropped 
him  into  the  midst  of  one  of  the  receptions 
of  Pius  IX.  However,  it  was  somewhat 
late  to  go  to  the  bottom  of  the  matter,  so  I 
dismissed  it  from  my  mind,  and  began  an 
examination  of  my  neighbors. 


100  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

A  cynic  has  observed  that  all  cats  are 
gray  in  the  twilight.  He  said  cats,  but 
meant  women.  I  am  convinced  that  all 
women  are  not  alike  in  a  black  silk  dress, 
very  simply  trimmed  and  with  no  color 
about  it  except  a  white  rose  at  the  corsage. 
There  are  women  —  perhaps  not  too  many 
—  whose  beauty  is  heightened  by  an  aus- 
tere toilette.  Such  a  one  was  the  lady  op- 
posite me,  with  her  veil  twisted  under  her 
chin  and  falling  negligently  over  the  left 
shoulder.  The  beauty  of  her  face  flashed 
out  like  a  diamond  from  its  sombre  setting. 
She  had  the  brightest  of  dark  eyes,  with 
such  a  thick,  long  fringe  of  dark  eyelashes 
that  her  whole  countenance  turned  into 
night  when  she  drooped  her  eyelids  ;  when 
she  lifted  them,  it  was  morning  again.  As 
if  to  show  us  what  might  be  done  in  the 
manner  of  contrasts,  nature  had  given  this 
lady  some  newly  coined  Roman  gold  for 
hair.  I  think  Eve  was  that  way  —  both 
blonde  and  brunette.  My  vis-d-vis  would 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.    101 

have  been  gracious  in  any  costume,, but  I 
am  positive  that  nothing  would  have  gone 
so  well  with  her  as  the  black  silk  dress,  fit- 
ting closely  to  the  pliant  bust  and  not  los- 
ing a  single  line  or  curve.  As  she  sat, 
turned  three  quarters  face,  the  window  be- 
hind her  threw  the  outlines  of  her  slender 
figure  into  sharp  relief.  The  lady  herself 
was  perfectly  well  aware  of  it. 

Next  to  this  charming  person  was  a  sub- 
stantial English  matron,  who  wore  her  hair 
done  up  in  a  kind  of  turret,  and  looked  like 
a  lithograph  of  a  distant  view  of  Windsor 
Castle.  She  sat  bolt  upright,  and  formed, 
if  I  may  say  so,  the  initial  letter  of  a  long 
line  of  fascinatingly  ugly  women.  Imagine 
a  row  of  Sphinxes  in  deep  mourning.  It 
would  have  been  an  unbroken  line  of  femi- 
nine severity,  but  for  a  handsome  young 
priest  with  a  strikingly  spiritual  face,  who 
came  in,  like  a  happy  word  in  parenthesis, 
half-way  down  the  row.  I  soon  exhausted 
the  resources  of  this  part  of  the  room ;  my 


102     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTS. 

eyes  went  back  to  the  Italian  lady  so  pret- 
tily framed  in  the  embrasure  of  the  window, 
and  would  have  lingered  there  had  I  not 
got  interested  in  an  old  gentleman  seated 
on  my  left.  When  he  came  into  the  room, 
blinking  his  kindly  blue  eyes  and  rubbing 
his  hands  noiselessly  together  and  beaming 
benevolently  on  everybody,  just  as  if  he 
were  expected,  I  fell  in  love  with  him. 
His  fragile,  aristocratic  hands  appeared  to 
have  been  done  up  by  the  same  blanchis- 
seuse  who  did  his  linen,  which  was  as  white 
and  crisp  as  an  Alpine  snow-drift,  as  were 
also  two  wintry  strands  of  hair  artfully 
trained  over  either  ear.  Otherwise  he  was 
as  bald  and  shiny  as  a  glacier.  He  seated 
himself  with  an  old-fashioned,  courteous 
bow  to  the  company  assembled,  and  a  pro- 
testing wave  of  the  hand,  as  if  to  say, 
"  Good  people,  I  pray  you,  do  not  disturb 
yourselves,"  and  made  all  that  side  of  the 
room  bright  with  his  smiling.  He  looked 
so  clean  and  sweet,  just  such  a  wholesome 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.    103 

figure  as  one  would  like  to  have  at  one's 
fireside  as  grandfather,  that  I  began  formu- 
lating the  wish  that  I  might,  thirty  or  forty- 
years  hence,  be  taken  for  his  twin  brother ; 
when  a  neighbor  of  his  created  a  distur- 
bance. 

This  neighbor  was  a  young  Italian  lady 
or  gentleman  —  I  cannot  affirm  which  —  of 
perhaps  ten  months'  existence,  who  up  to 
the  present  time  had  been  asleep  in  the 
arms  of  its  bonne.  Awaking  suddenly,  the 
bambino  had  given  vent  to  the  shrillest 
shrieks,  impelled  thereto  by  the  strange- 
ness of  the  surrounding  features,  or  perhaps 
by  some  conscientious  scruples  about  being 
in  the  Vatican.  I  picked  out  the  mother 
at  once  by  the  worried  expression  that  flew 
to  the  countenance  of  a  lady  near  me,  and 
in  a  gentleman  who  instantly  assumed  an 
air  of  having  no  connection  whatever  with 
the  baleful  infant,  I  detected  the  father.  I 
do  not  remember  to  have  seen  a  stronger 
instance  of  youthful  depravity  and  dupli- 


104     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

city  than  that  lemon-colored  child  afforded. 
The  moment  the  nurse  walked  with  it,  it 
sunk  into  the  sweetest  of  slumber,  and 
peace  settled  upon  its  little  nose  like  a 
drowsy  bee  upon  the  petal  of  a  flower ;  but 
the  instant  the  bonne  made  a  motion  to  sit 
down,  it  broke  forth  again.  I  do  not  know 
what  ultimately  befell  the  vocal  goblin  ; 
possibly  it  was  collared  by  the  lieutenant 
of  the  guard  outside,  and  thrown  into  the 
deepest  dungeon  of  the  palace ;  at  all  events 
it  disappeared  after  the  announcement  that 
his  Holiness  would  be  with  us  shortly. 
Whatever  virtues  Pius  IX.  possessed,  punc- 
tuality was  not  one  of  them,  for  he  had 
kept  us  waiting  three  quarters  of  an  hour, 
and  we  had  still  another  fifteen  minutes  to 
wait. 

The  monotonous  hum  of  conversation 
hushed  itself  abruptly,  the  two  sections  of 
the  wide  door  I  have  mentioned  were 
thrown  open,  and  the  Pope,  surrounded  by 
his  cardinals  and  a  number  of  foreign 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.     105 

princes,  entered.  The  occupants  of  the 
two  long  settees  rose,  and  then,  as  if  they 
were  automata  worked  by  the  same  tyran- 
nical wire,  sunk  simultaneously  into  an  at- 
titude of  devotion.  For  an  instant  I  was 
seized  with  a  desperate  desire  not  to  kneel. 
There  is  something  in  an  American  knee, 
when  it  is  rightly  constructed,  that  makes 
it  an  awkward  thing  to  kneel  with  before 
any  man  born  of  woman.  Perhaps,  if  the 
choice  were  left  one,  either  to  prostrate 
one's  self  before  a  certain  person  or  be  shot, 
one  might  make  a  point  of  it  —  and  be  shot. 
But  that  was  not  the  alternative  in  the 
present  case.  If  I  had  failed  to  follow  the 
immemorial  custom  I  should  not  have  had 
the  honor  of  a  fusilade,  but  would  have 
been  ignominiously  led  away  by  one  of 
those  highly-colored  Swiss  guards,  and,  in 
my  dress  suit,  would  have  presented  to  the 
general  stare  the  appearance  of  a  preten- 
tious ace  of  spades  being  wiped  out  by  a  gay 
right-bower.  Such  humiliation  was  not  to 


106    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

be  thought  of !  So,  wishing  myself  safely 
back  amid  the  cruder  civilization  of  the 
New  World,  and  with  a  mental  protest  ac- 
companied by  a  lofty  compassion  for  the 
weakness  and  cowardice  of  human-kind,  I 
slid  softly  down  with  the  rest  of  the  miser- 
able sinners.  I  was  in  the  very  act,  when 
I  was  chilled  to  the  marrow  by  catching  a 
sidelong  glimpse  of  my  benign  old  gentle- 
man placidly  leaning  back  in  his  seat,  with 
his  hands  folded  over  his  well-filled  waist- 
coat and  that  same  benevolent  smile  pet- 
rified on  his  countenance.  He  was  fast 
asleep. 

Immediately  a  tall,  cadaverous  person  in 
a  scant,  funereal  garment  emerged  from 
somewhere,  and  touched  the  sleeper  on  the 
shoulder.  The  old  gentleman  unclosed  his 
eyes  slowly  and  with  difficulty,  and  was 
so  far  from  taking  in  the  situation  that  he 
made  a  gesture  as  if  to  shake  hands  with 
the  tall,  cadaverous  person.  Then  it  all 
flashed  upon  the  dear  old  boy,  and  he 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.    107 

dropped  to  his  knees  with  so  comical  and 
despairing  an  air  of  contrition  that  the 
presence  of  forty  thousand  popes  would  not 
have  prevented  me  from  laughing. 

Another  discomposing  incident  occurred 
at  this  juncture.  Two  removes  below  me 
was  a  smooth-faced  German  of  gigantic 
stature ;  he  must  have  been  six  or  seven 
inches  over  six  feet  in  height,  but  so  ab- 
surdly short  between  the  knee-cap  and 
ankle  that  as  he  knelt  he  towered  head 
and  shoulders  above  us  all,  resembling  a 
great,  overgrown  school-boy,  standing  up 
as  straight  as  he  could.  It  was  so  he  im- 
pressed one  of  the  ghostly  attendants,  who 
advanced  quickly  towards  him  with  the 
evident  purpose  of  requesting  him  to  kneel. 
Discovering  his  error  just  in  time,  the  rev- 
erend father  retreated,  much  abashed. 

All  eyes  were  now  turned  toward  the 
Pope  and  his  suite,  and  this  trifling  episode 
passed  unnoticed  save  by  two  or  three  in- 
dividuals hi  the  immediate  neighborhood, 


108  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTff. 

who  succeeded  in  swallowing  their  smiles, 
but  did  not  dare  glance  at  each  other  after- 
wards. The  Pope  advanced  to  the  centre 
of  the  upper  end  of  the  room,  leaning  heav- 
ily on  his  ivory-handled  cane,  the  princes 
in  black  and  the  cardinals  in  scarlet  stand- 
ing behind  him  in  picturesque  groups,  like 
the  chorus  in  an  opera.  Indeed,  it  was  all 
like  a  scene  on  the  stage.  There  was 
something  premeditated  and  spectacular 
about  it,  as  if  these  persons  had  been  en- 
gaged for  the  occasion.  Several  of  the 
princes  were  Russian,  with  names  quite 
well  adapted  to  not  being  remembered. 
Among  the  Italian  gentlemen  was  Cardi- 
nal Nobli  Vatteleschi  —  he  was  not  a  car- 
dinal then,  by  the  way  —  who  died  not 
long  ago. 

Within  whispering  distance  of  the  Pope 
stood  Cardinal  Antonelli  —  a  man  who 
would  not  escape  observation  in  any  assem- 
bly of  notable  personages.  If  the  Inquisi- 
tion should  be  revived  in  its  early  genial 


A  VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.    109 

form,  and  the  reader  should  fall  into  its 
hands  —  as  would  very  likely  be  the  case, 
if  a  branch  office  were  established  in  this 
country  —  he  would  feel  scarcely  comfort- 
able if  his  chief  inquisitor  had  so  cold  and 
subtle  a  countenance  as  Giacome  Anto- 
nelli's. 

We  occasionally  meet  in  political  or  in 
social  life  a  man  whose  presence  seems  to 
be  an  anachronism  —  a  man  belonging  to  a 
type  we  fancied  extinct ;  he  affects  us  as  a 
living  dodo  would  the  naturalist,  though 
perhaps  not  with  so  great  an  enthusiasm. 
Cardinal  Antonelli,  in  his  bearing  and  the 
cast  of  his  countenance,  had  that  air  of  re- 
moteness which  impresses  us  in  the  works 
of  the  old  masters.  I  had  seen  somewhere 
a  head  of  Velasquez  for  which  the  cardinal 
might  have  posed.  With  the  subdued  af- 
ternoon light  falling  upon  him  through  the 
deep-set  lunette,  he  seemed  like  some  cruel 
prelate  escaped  from  one  of  the  earlier  vol- 
umes of  Froude's  History  of  England  — 


110    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

subtle,  haughty,  intolerant.  I  did  not 
mean  to  allow  so  sinister  an  impression  to 
remain  on  my  mind ;  but  all  I  have  since 
read  and  heard  of  Cardinal  Antonelli  has 
not  obliterated  it. 

It  was  a  pleasure  to  turn  from  the  im- 
passible prime  minister  to  the  gentle  and 
altogether  interesting  figure  of  his  august 
master,  with  his  small,  sparkling  eyes,  re- 
markably piercing  when  he  looked  at  you 
point-blank,  and  a  smile  none  the  less  win- 
some that  it  lighted  up  a  mouth  denoting 
unusual  force  of  will.  His  face  was  not  at 
all  the  face  of  a  man  who  had  passed  nearly 
half  a  century  in  arduous  diplomatic  and 
ecclesiastical  labors ;  it  was  certainly  the 
face  of  a  man  who  had  led  a  temperate, 
blameless  private  life,  in  noble  contrast  to 
many  of  his  profligate  predecessors,  whom 
the  world  was  only  too  glad  to  have  snugly 
•stowed  away  in  their  gorgeous  porphyry 
coffins  with  a  marble  mistress  carved  atop. 

Giovanni  Maria  Mastai  Ferretti  was  born 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.     Ill 

in  Sinigaglia  on  the  13th  of  May,  1792 ; 
the  week  previous  to  this  reception  he  had 
celebrated  his  eighty-third  birthday ;  but 
he  did  not  look  over  sixty-five  or  seventy, 
as  he  stood  there  in  his  skull-cap  of  cream- 
white  broadcloth  and  his  long  pontifical 
robes  of  the  same  material  —  a  costume 
that  lent  an  appearance  of  height  to  an  un- 
dersized, stoutly  built  figure.  With  his  sil- 
very hair  straggling  from  beneath  the  skull- 
cap, and  his  smoothly-shaven  pale  face,  a 
trifle  heavy,  perhaps  because  of  the  double 
chin,  he  was  a  very  beautiful  old  man. 
After  pausing  a  moment  or  two  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  chamber,  and  taking  a  bird's-eye 
glance  at  his  guests,  the  Pope  began  his 
rounds.  Assigned  to  each  group  of  five  or 
ten  persons  was  an  official  who  presented 
the  visitors  by  name,  indicating  their  na- 
tionality, station,  etc.  So  far  as  the  nation- 
ality was  involved,  that  portion  of  the  in- 
troduction was  obviously  superfluous,  for 
the  Pope  singled  out  his  countrymen  at  a 


112     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

glance,  and  at  once  addressed  them  in  Ital- 
ian, scarcely  waiting  for  the  master  of  cere- 
monies to  perform  his  duties.  To  foreign- 
ers his  Holiness  spoke  in  French.  After  a 
few  words  of  salutation  he  gave  his  hand 
to  each  person,  who  touched  it  with  his 
lips  or  his  forehead,  or  simply  retained  it 
an  instant.  It  was  a  deathly  cold  hand, 
on  the  forefinger  of  which  was  a  great  seal 
ring  bearing  a  mottled  gray  stone  that 
seemed  frozen.  As  the  Pope  moved  slowly 
along,  devotees  caught  at  the  hem  of  his 
robe  and  pressed  it  to  their  lips,  and  in 
most  instances  bowed  down  and  kissed  his 
feet.  I  suppose  it  was  only  by  years  of 
practice  that  his  Holiness  was  able  to  avoid 
stepping  on  a  nose  here  and  there. 

It   came  our   turn   at   last.     As   he  ap- 
proached us  he  said,  with  a  smile,  "  Ah,  I 

see   you   are   Americans."     Signer  V 

then  presented  us  formally,  and  the  Pope 
was  kind  enough  to  say  to  us  what  he  had 
probably  said  to  twenty  thousand  other 


A    VISIT  TO  AN  OLD   GENTLEMAN.    113 

Americans  in  the  course  of  several  hundred 
similar  occasions.  After  he  had  passed  on, 
the  party  that  had  paid  their  respects  to 
him  resumed  their  normal  position  —  I  am 
not  sure  this  was  not  the  most  enjoyable 
feature  of  the  affair  —  and  gave  themselves 
up  to  watching  the  other  presentations. 
When  these  were  concluded,  the  Pope  re- 
turned to  the  point  of  his  departure,  and 
proceeded  to  bless  the  rosaries  and  crosses 
and  souvenirs  that  had  been  brought,  in 
greater  or  lesser  numbers,  by  every  one. 
There  were  salvers  piled  with  rosaries, 
arms  strung  from  wrist  to  shoulder  with 
rosaries  —  so  many  carven  amulets,  and 
circlets  of  beads  and  crucifixes,  indeed,  that 
it  would  have  been  the  labor  of  weeks  to 
bless  them  separately;  so  his  Holiness 
blessed  them  in  bulk. 

It  was  then  that  the  neat  little  Ameri- 
can lady  who  sat  next  us  confirmed  my 
suspicions  as  to  her  brideship  by  slyly  slip- 
ping from  her  wedding  finger  a  plain  gold 


114    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ring,  which  she  attached  to  her  rosary  with 
a  thread  from  her  veil.  Seeing  herself  de- 
tected in  the  act,  she  turned  to  Madama, 
and,  making  up  the  most  piquant  little 
face  in  the  world,  whispered  confidentially, 
"  Of  course  I  'm  not  a  Roman  Catholic,  you 
know ;  but  if  there  's  anything  efficacious 
in  the  blessing,  I  don't  want  to  lose  it.  I 
want  to  take  all  the  chances."  For  my 
part,  I  hope  and  believe  the  Pope's  bless- 
ing will  cling  to  that  diminutive  wedding 
ring  for  many  and  many  a  year. 

This  ceremony  finished,  his  Holiness  ad- 
dressed to  his  guests  the  neatest  of  fare- 
wells, delivered  in  enviable  French,  in 
which  he  wished  a  prosperous  voyage  to 
those  pilgrims  whose  homes  lay  beyond  the 
sea,  and  a  happy  return  to  all.  When  he 
touched,  as  he  did  briefly,  on  the  misfor- 
tunes of  the  church,  an  adorable  fire  came 
into  his  eyes  ;  fifty  of  his  eighty-three  win- 
ters slipped  from  him  as  if  by  enchantment, 
and  for  a  few  seconds  he  stood  forth  in  the 


A   VISIT  TO  AN  OLD  GENTLEMAN.    115 

prime  of  life.  He  spoke  some  five  or  seven 
minutes,  and  nothing  could  have  been  more 
dignified  and  graceful  than  the  matter  and 
the  manner  of  his  words.  The  benediction 
was  followed  by  a  general  rustle  and  move- 
ment among  the  princes  and  eminenze  at  the 
farther  end  of  the  room ;  the  double  door 
opened  softly,  and  closed  —  and  that  was 
the  last  the  Pope  saw  of  us. 


VI. 
ON  A  BALCONY. 


VL 

ON  A  BALCONY. 


A  BALCONY,  as  we  northerns  know  it, 
is  a  humiliating  architectural  link  between 
in-doors  and  out-of-doors.  To  be  on  a  bal- 
cony is  to  be  nowhere  in  particular :  you 
are  not  exactly  at  home,  and  yet  cannot  be 
described  as  out;  your  privacy  and  your 
freedom  are  alike  sacrificed.  The  approach- 
ing bore  has  you  at  his  mercy ;  he  can  draw 
a  bead  on  you  with  his  rifled  eye  at  a  hun- 
dred paces.  You  may  gaze  abstractedly  at 
a  cloud,  or  turn  your  back,  but  you  cannot 
escape  him,  though  the  chance  is  always 
open  to  you  to  drop  a  bureau  on  him  as  he 
lifts  his  hand  to  the  bell-knob.  One  could 
fill  a  volume  with  a  condensed  catalogue  of 


120  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTff. 

the  inconveniences  of  an  average  balcony. 
But  when  the  balcony  hangs  from  the 
third-story  window  of  an  Old  World  palace, 
and  when  the  facade  of  that  Old  World 
palace  looks  upon  the  Bay  of  Naples,  you 
had  better  think  twice  before  you  speak 
depreciatingly  of  balconies.  With  that 
sheet  of  mysteriously  blue  water  in  front 
of  you;  with  Mount  Vesuvius  moodily 
smoking  his  perpetual  calumet  on  your 
left ;  with  the  indented  shore  sweeping  to- 
wards Pozzuoli  and  Baise  on  your  right ; 
with  Capri  and  Ischia  notching  the  ashen 
gray  line  of  the  horizon ;  with  the  tender 
heaven  of  May  bending  over  all  —  with 
these  accessories,  I  say,  it  must  be  con- 
ceded that  one  might  be  very  much  worse 
off  in  this  world  than  on  a  balcony. 

I  know  that  I  came  to  esteem  the  narrow 
iron-grilled  shelf  suspended  from  my  bed- 
room window  in  the  hotel  on  the  Strada 
Chiatamone  as  the  choicest  spot  in  all  Na< 
pies.  After  a  ramble  through  the  unsavory 


ON  A  BALCONY.  121 

streets  it  was  always  a  pleasure  to  get  back 
to  it,  and  I  think  I"  never  in  my  life  did  a 
more  sensible  thing  in  the  department  of 
pure  idleness  than  when  I  resolved  to  spend 
an  entire  day  on  that  balcony.  One  morn- 
ing, after  an  early  breakfast,  I  established 
myself  there  in  an  arm-chair  placed  beside 
a  small  table  holding  a  couple  of  books,  a 
paper  of  cigarettes,  and  a  field-glass.  My 
companions  had  gone  to  explore  the  pic- 
ture-galleries ;  but  I  had  my  picture-gallery 
chez  moi  —  in  the  busy  strada  below,  in  the 
villa-fringed  bay,  in  the  cluster  of  yellow- 
roofed  little  towns  clinging  to  the  purple 
slopes  of  Mount  Vesuvius  and  patiently 
awaiting  annihilation.  The  beauty  of  Na- 
ples lies  along  its  water-front,  and  from  my 
coigne  of  vantage  I  had  nothing  to  desire. 

If  the  Bay  of  Naples  had  not  been  de- 
scribed a  million  times  during  the  present 
century,  I  should  still  not  attempt  to  de- 
scribe it :  I  have  made  a  discovery  which 
no  other  traveller  seems  to  have  made  — 


122     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

that  its  loveliness  is  untranslatable.  More- 
over, enthusiasm  is  not  permitted  to  the 
modern  tourist.  He  may  be  aesthetic,  or 
historic,  or  scientific,  or  analytic,  or  didac- 
tic, or  any  kind  of  ic,  except  enthusiastic. 
He  may  be  Meissonier-like  in  his  detail; 
he  may  give  you  the  very  tint  and  texture 
of  a  honeycombed  frieze  over  a  Byzantine 
gateway,  or  lay  bare  the  yet  faintly  palpi- 
tating heart  of  some  old-time  tragedy,  but 
he  must  do  it  in  a  nonchalant,  pulseless 
manner,  with  a  semi-supercilious  elevation 
of  nostril.  He  would  lose  his  self-respect 
if  he  were  to  be  deeply  moved  by  anything, 
or  really  interested  in  anything. 

"  All  that  he  sees  in  Bagdad 
Is  the  Tigris  to  float  him  away." 

He  is  the  very  antipode  of  his  elder  brother 
of  fifty  years  syne,  who  used  to  go  about 
filling  his  note-book  with  Thoughts  on 
Standing  at  the  Tomb  of  Marcus  Antoni- 
nus, Emotions  on  Finding  a  Flea  on  my 
Shirt  Collar  in  the  Val  d'Arno,  and  the 


ON  A  BALCONY.  123 

like.  The  latter-day  tourist  is  a  great  deal 
less  innocent,  but  is  he  more  amusing  than 
those  old-fashioned  sentimental  travellers 
who  had  at  least  freshness  of  sympathies 
and  never  dreamed  of  trying  to  pass  them- 
selves off  as  cynics  ?  Dear,  ingenuous,  im- 
pressible souls  —  peace  to  your  books  of 
travel !  May  they  line  none  but  trunks 
destined  to  prolonged  foreign  tours,  or  those 
thrice  happy  trunks  which  go  on  bridal 
journeys ! 

At  the  risk  of  being  relegated  to  the 
footing  of  those  emotional  ancients,  I  am 
going  to  confess  to  an  unrequited  passion 
for  Mount  Vesuvius.  Never  was  passion 
less  regarded  by  its  object.  I  did  not  as- 
pire to  be  received  with  the  warmth  of 
manner  that  characterized  its  reception  of 
the  elder  Pliny  in  the  year  79,  but  I  did 
want  Mount  Vesuvius  to  pay  me  a  little  at- 
tention, which  it  might  easily  have  done  — 
without  putting  itself  out.  On  arriving 
in  town  I  had  called  on  Mount  Vesuvius. 


124          FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

The  acquaintance  rested  there.  Every 
night,  after  my  candle  was  extinguished, 
I  stood  a  while  at  the  open  window  and 
glanced  half-expectantly  across  the  bay ; 
but  the  sullen  monster  made  no  sign.  That  • 
slender  spiral  column  of  smoke,  spreading 
out  like  a  toad-stool  on  attaining  a  certain 
height,  but  neither  increasing  nor  diminish- 
ing in  volume,  lifted  itself  into  the  star- 
light. Sometimes  I  fancied  that  the  smoke 
had  taken  a  deeper  lurid  tinge  ;  but  it  was 
only  fancy.  How  I  longed  for  a  sudden 
burst  of  flame  and  scoriae  from  those  yawn- 
ing jaws  !  —  for  one  awful  instant's  illumi- 
nation of  the  bay  and  the  shipping  and  the 
picturesque  villages  asleep  at  the  foot  of 
the  mountain  !  I  did  not  care  to  have  the 
spectacle  last  more  than  four  or  five  heart- 
beats at  the  longest ;  but  it  was  a  thing 
worth  wishing  for. 

I  do  not  believe  that  even  the  most  hard- 
ened traveller  is  able  wholly  to  throw  off 
the  grim  fascination  of  Mount  Vesuvius  so 


ON  A  BALCONY.  125 

long  as  he  is  near  it;  and  I  quite  under- 
stand the  potency  of  the  spell  which  has 
led  the  poor  people  of  Resina  to  set  up 
their  Lares  and  Penates  on  cinder-buried 
Herculaneum.  Bide  your  time,  O  Resina, 
and  Portici,  and  Torre  del  Greco  !  The 
doom  of  Pompeii  and  Herculaneum  shall 
yet  be  yours.  "If  it  be  now,  'tis  not  to 
come ;  if  it  be  not  to  come,  it  will  be  now ; 
if  it  be  not  now,  yet  it  will  come." 

Indeed,  these  villages  have  suffered  re- 
peatedly in  ancient  and  modern  times.  In 
the  eruption  of  1631  seven  torrents  of  lava 
swept  down  the  mountain,  taking  in  their 
course  Bosco,  Torre  dell'  Annunziata,  Torre 
del  Greco,  Resina,  and  Portici,  and  destroy- 
ing three  thousand  lives.  That  calamity 
and  later  though  not  so  terrible  catastro- 
phes have  not  prevented  the  people  from 
rebuilding  on  the  old  sites.  The  singular 
fertility  of  the  soil  around  the  base  of  the 
volcanic  pile  lures  them  back  —  or  is  it 
that  they  are  under  the  influence  of  that 


126     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

nameless  glamour  I  have  hinted  at  ?  Per- 
haps those  half-indistinguishable  shapes  of 
petrified  gnome  and  satyr  and  glyptodon 
which  lie  tumbled  in  heaps  all  about  this 
region  have  something  to  do  with  it.  It 
would  be  easy  to  believe  that  some  of  the 
nightmare  figures  and  landscapes  in  Dora's 
illustrations  of  The  Wandering  Jew  were 
suggested  to  the  artist  by  the  fantastic 
forms  in  which  the  lava  streams  have  cooled 
along  the  flanks  of  Vesuvius. 

A  man  might  spend  a  busy  life  in  study- 
ing the  phenomena  of  this  terrible  moun- 
tain. It  is  undergoing  constant  changes. 
The  paths  to  the  crater  have  to  be  varied 
from  month  to  month,  so  it  is  never  safe  to 
make  the  ascent  without  a  guide.  There 
is  a  notable  sympathy  existing  between  the 
volcanoes  of  Vesuvius  and  ^Etna,  although 
seventy  miles  apart ;  when  one  is  in  a  pe- 
riod of  unusual  activity,  the  other,  as  a 
rule,  remains  quiescent.  May  be  the  im- 
prisoned giant  Enceladus  works  both  forges. 


ON  A  BALCONY.  127 

I  never  think  of  either  mountain  without 
recalling  Longfellow's  poem :  — 

"  Under  Mount  ^Etna  he  lies, 

It  is  slumber,  it  is  not  death ; 
For  he  struggles  at  times  to  arise, 
And  above  him  the  lurid  skies 

Are  hot  with  his  fiery  breath. 

"  The  crags  are  piled  on  his  breast, 

The  earth  is  heaped  on  his  head ; 
But  the  groans  of  his  wild  unrest, 
Though  smothered  and  half  suppressed, 
Are  heard,  and  he  is  not  dead. 

"  And  the  nations  far  away 

Are  watching  with  eager  eyes; 
They  talk  together  and  say, 
'  To-morrow,  perhaps  to-day, 
Enceladus  will  arise  ! ' 

"And  the  old  gods,  the  austere 

Oppressors  in  their  strength, 
Stand  aghast  and  white  with  fear 
At  the  ominous  sounds  they  hear, 
And  tremble,  and  mutter,  '  At  length  I 

14  Ah  me !  for  the  land  that  is  sown 

With  the  harvest  of  despair ! 
Where  the  burning  cinders,  blown 


128     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTS. 

From  the  lips  of  the  overthrown 
Enceladus,  fill  the  air. 

"  Where  ashes  are  heaped  in  drifts 

Over  vineyard  and  field  and  town, 
Whenever  he  starts  and  lifts 
His  head  through  the  blackened  rifts 
Of  the  crags  that  keep  him  down. 

"  See,  see  !  the  red  light  shines  ! 

'T  is  the  glare  of  his  awful  eyes ! 
And  the  storm-wind  shouts  through  the  pines, 
Of  Alps  and  of  Apennines, 
'  Enceladus,  arise  ! ' ' 

For  the  first  half  hour  after  I  had  sta- 
tioned myself  on  the  balcony,  that  morning, 
I  kept  my  glass  turned  pretty  constantly 
in  the  direction  of  Mount  Vesuvius,  trying 
to  make  out  the  osteria  at  the  Hermitage, 
where  we  had  halted  one  noon  to  drink 
some  doubtful  Lachryma  Christi  and  eat  a 
mysterious  sort  of  ragout,  composed  —  as 
one  of  our  party  suggested  —  of  missing- 
link.  Whether  or  not  the  small  inn  had 
shifted  its  position  over  night,  I  was  unable 
to  get  a  focus  upon  it.  In  the  mean  while 


ON  A  BALCONY.  129 

I  myself,  in  my  oriole  nest  overhanging  the 
strada,  had  become  an  object  of  burning  in- 
terest to  sundry  persons  congregated  below. 
I  was  suddenly  aware  that  three  human 
beings  were  standing  in  the  middle  of  the 
carriage-way  with  their  faces  turned  up  to 
the  balcony.  The  first  was  a  slender,  hid- 
eous girl,  with  large  eyes  and  little  cloth- 
ing, who  held  out  a  tambourine,  the  rattle- 
snake-like clatter  of  which  had  attracted 
my  attention;  next  to  her  stood  a  fellow 
with  canes  and  palm-leaf  fans ;  then  came 
a  youth  loaded  down  with  diminutive  osier 
baskets  of  Naples  strawberries,  which  look, 
and  as  for  that  matter  taste,  like  tufts  of 
red  worsted.  This  select  trio  was  speedily 
turned  into  a  quartette  by  the  arrival  of  a 
sea-faring  gentleman,  who  bore  on  his  head 
a  tray  of  boiled  crabs,  sea-urchins,  and 
small  fried  fish — frutti  di  mare.  As  a 
fifth  personage  approached,  with  possibly 
the  arithmetical  intention  of  adding  him- 
self to  the  line,  I  sent  the  whole  party  off 
9 


130    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

with  a  wave  of  the  hand ;  that  is  to  say, 
I  waved  to  them  to  go,  but  they  merely 
retired  to  the  curb-stone  opposite  the  hotel, 
and  sat  down. 

The  last  comer,  perhaps  disdaining  to  as- 
sociate himself  too  closely  with  vulgar  per- 
sons engaged  in  trade,  leaned  indolently 
against  the  sea-wall  behind  them,  and 
stared  at  me  in  a  vacant,  dreamy  fashion. 
He  was  a  handsome  wretch,  physically. 
Praxiteles  might  have  carved  him.  I  have 
no  doubt  that  his  red  Phrygian  cap  con- 
cealed a  pair  of  pointed  furry  ears  ;  but  his 
tattered  habiliments  and  the  strips  of  gay 
cloth  wound,  brigand-like,  about  his  calves 
were  not  able  to  hide  the  ungyved  grace  of 
his  limbs.  The  upturned  face  was  for  the 
moment  as  empty  of  expression  as  a  cipher, 
but  I  felt  that  it  was  capable,  on  occasion, 
of  expressing  almost  any  depth  of  cunning 
and  dare-devil  ferocity.  I  dismissed  the 
idea  of  the  Dancing  Faun.  It  was  Masa- 
niello  —  Masaniello  ruined  by  good  govern- 
ment and  the  dearth  of  despots. 


ON  A  BALCONY.  131 

The  girl  with  the  tambourine  was  not  in 
business  by  herself ;  she  was  the  familiar 
of  a  dark -browed  organ -man,  who  now 
made  his  appearance,  holding  in  one  hand 
a  long  fishing-line  baited  with  monkey. 
On  observing  that  this  line  was  too  short 
to  reach  me,  the  glance  of  despair  and  re- 
proach which  the  pirate  cast  up  at  the 
balcony  was  comical.  Nevertheless  he  pro- 
ceeded to  turn  the  crank  of  his  music-mill, 
while  the  girl  —  whose  age  I  estimated  at 
anywhere  between  sixteen  and  sixty  —  ex- 
ecuted the  tarantella  in  a  disinterested 
manner  on  the  sidewalk.  I  had  always 
wished  to  see  the  tarantella  danced,  and 
now  I  had  seen  it  I  wished  never  to  see  it 
more.  I  was  so  well  satisfied  that  I  has- 
tened to  drop  a  few  soldi  into  the  out- 
stretched tambourine  ;  one  of  the  coins  re- 
bounded and  fell  into  the  girl's  parchment 
bosom,  which  would  not  have  made  a  bad 
tambourine  itself. 

My  gratuity  had  the  anticipated  effect ; 


132     FROM  rONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  musician  took  himself  off  instantly. 
But  he  was  only  the  avant  coureur  of  his 
detestable  tribe.  To  dispose  at  once  of  this 
feature  of  Neapolitan  street  life,  I  will  state 
that  in  the  course  of  that  morning  and  af- 
ternoon one  hundred  and  seven  organ-men 
and  zambognari  (bagpipe  players)  paid 
their  respects  to  me.  It  is  odd,  or  not,  as 
you  choose  to  look  at  it,  that  the  city  which 
has  the  eminence  of  being  the  first  school 
of  music  in  the  world  should  be  a  city  of 
hand-organs.  I  think  it  explains  the  con- 
stant irritability  and  the  occasional  out- 
breaks of  wrath  on  the  part  of  Mount  Ve- 
suvius. 

The  youth  with  strawberries,  and  his 
two  companions,  the  fan-man  and  the  seller 
of  sea  fruit,  remained  on  the  curb-stone  for 
an  hour  or  more,  waiting  for  me  to  relent. 
In  most  lands,  when  you  inform  a  trafficker 
in  nicknacks  of  your  indisposition  to  pur- 
chase his  wares,  he  departs  with  more  or 
less  philosophy ;  but  in  Naples  he  some- 


ON  A  BALCONY.  133 

times  attaches  himself  to  you  for  the  day. 

One    morning    our   friend  J ,  who    is 

almost  morbidly  diffident,  returned  to  the 
hotel  attended  by  an  individual  with  a  gui- 
tar, two  venders  of  lava  carvings,  a  leper 
in  the  final  stages  of  decomposition,  and 
a  young  lady  costumed  en  nSgligS  with  a 

bunch   of  violets.     J had  picked  up 

these  charming  acquaintances  in  one  of  the 
principal  streets  at  the  remote  end  of  the 
town.  The  perspiration  stood  nearly  an 

inch  deep  on  J 's  forehead.     He  had 

vainly  done  everything  to  get  rid  of  them  : 
he  had  heaped  gifts  of  money  on  the  leper, 
bought  wildly  of  cameos  and  violets,  and 
even  offered  to  purchase  the  guitar.  But 
no :  they  clung  to  him.  An  American  of 
this  complexion  was  not  caught  every  day 
on  the  Corso  Vittorio  Emanuele. 

I  was  so  secure  from  annoyance  up  there 
on  my  balcony  that  I  did  not  allow  the 
three  merchants  arranged  on  the  curb-stone 
to  distract  me.  Occupied  with  the  lively, 


134    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

many-colored  life  of  the  street  and  the 
shore,  I  failed  even  to  notice  when  they 
went  away.  Glancing  in  their  direction 
somewhat  later,  I  saw  that  they  had  gone. 
But  Masaniello  remained,  resting  the  hol- 
low of  his  back  and  his  two  elbows  on  the 
coping  of  the  wall,  and  becoming  a  part  of 
the  gracious  landscape.  He  remained  there 
all  day.  Why,  I  shall  never  know.  He 
made  no  demand  on  my  purse,  or  any  over- 
ture towards  my  acquaintance,  but  stood 
there,  statuesque,  hour  after  hour,  scarcely 
changing  his  attitude  —  insouciant,  imper- 
turbable, never  for  an  instant  relapsing 
from  that  indolent  reserve  which  had 
marked  him  at  first,  except  once,  when  he 
smiled  (rather  sarcastically,  I  thought)  as 
I  fell  victim  to  an  aged  beggar  whose  band- 
aged legs  gave  me  the  fancy  that  they  had 
died  early  and  been  embalmed,  and  were 
only  waiting  for  the  rest  of  the  man  to  die 
in  order  to  be  buried.  Then  Masaniello 
smiled  —  at  my  softness  ?  I  shall  never  be 
able  to  explain  the  man. 


ON  A  BALCONY.  135 

Though  the  Chiataraone  is  a  quiet  street 
for  Naples,  it  would  be  considered  a  bus- 
tling thoroughfare  anywhere  else.  As  the 
morning  wore  on,  I  found  entertainment 
enough  in  the  constantly  increasing  stream 
of  foot-passengers  —  soldiers,  sailors,  monks, 
peddlers,  paupers,  and  donkeys.  Now  and 
then  a  couple  of  acrobats  in  soiled  tights 
and  tarnished  spangles  would  spread  out 
their  square  of  carpet  in  front  of  the  hotel, 
and  go  through  some  innocent  feats ;  or  it 
was  a  juggler  who  came  along  with  a  sword 
trick,  or  a  man  with  fantoccini,  among 
which  Signor  Punchinello  was  a  prominent 
character,  as  he  invariably  is  in  Italian  pup- 
pet-shows. This,  with  the  soft  Neapolitan 
laugh  and  chatter,  the  cry  of  orange-girls, 
the  braying  of  donkeys,  and  the  strident 
strain  of  the  hand-organ,  which  interposed 
itself  ever  and  anon,  like  a  Greek  chorus, 
was  doing  very  well  for  a  quiet  little  street 
of  no  pretensions  whatever. 

For  a  din  to  test  the  tympanum  of  your 


136     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ear,  and  a  restless  swarming  of  life  to  turn 
you  dizzy,  you  should  go  to  the  Strada 
Santa  Lucia  of  a  pleasant  morning.  The 
houses  in  this  quarter  of  the  city  are  nar- 
row and  tall,  many  of  them  seven  or  eight 
stories  high,  and  packed  like  bee-hives, 
which  they  further  resemble  in  point  of 
gloominess  and  stickiness.  Here  the  lower 
classes  live,  and  if  they  live  chiefly  on  the 
sidewalks  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at.  In 
front  of  the  dingy  door-ways  and  arches  the 
women  make  their  soups  and  their  toilets 
with  equal  naivete  of  disregard  to  passing 
criticism.  The  baby  is  washed,  dressed, 
nursed,  and  put  to  sleep,  and  all  the  domes- 
tic duties  performed,  al  fresco.  Glancing 
up  the  sunny  street  at  some  particularly 
fretful  moment  of  the  day,  you  may  chance 
to  catch  an  instantaneous  glimpse  of  the 
whole  neighborhood  spanking  its  child. 

In  the  Strada  Santa  Lucia,  the  clattering 
donkey  cart  has  solved  the  problem  of  per- 
petual motion.  Not  less  noisy  and  crowded 


ON  A  BALCONY.  137 

are  those  contiguous  hill-side  lanes  and  al- 
leys (gradoni)  where  you  go  up  and  down 
stone  steps,  and  can  almost  touch  the  build- 
ings on  both  sides.  No  wheeled  vehicle 
ever  makes  its  way  here,  though  sometimes 
a  donkey,  with  panniers  stuffed  full  of  veg- 
etables, may  be  seen  gravely  mounting  or 
descending  the  slippery  staircase,  directed 
by  the  yells  and  ingenious  blasphemies  of 
his  driver,  who  is  always  assisted  in  this 
matter  by  sympathetic  compatriots  stand- 
ing in  door-ways,  or  leaning  perilously  out 
of  seventh  story  windows.  Some  of  the 
streets  in  this  section  are  entirely  given 
over  to  the  manufacture  of  macaroni.  On 
interminable  clothes-lines,  stretched  along 
the  sidewalks  at  the  height  of  a  man's  head, 
the  flabby  threads  of  paste  are  hung  to  dry, 
forming  a  continuous  sheet,  which  sways 
like  heavy  satin  drapery  and  nearly  trails 
on  the  ground ;  but  the  dogs  run  in  and  out 
through  the  dripping  fringe  without  the 
least  inconvenience  to  themselves.  Now 


138     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

and  then  one  will  thoughtfully  turn  back 
and  lap  it.  Macaroni  was  formerly  a  fa- 
vorite plat  of  mine.  Day  and  night  the 
hum  of  human  voices  rises  from  these 
shabby  streets.  As  to  the  smells  which  in- 
fest them  —  "  Give  me  an  ounce  of  civet, 
good  apothecary,  to  sweeten  my  imagina- 
tion." Here  Squalor  reigns,  seated  on  his 
throne  of  mud.  But  it  is  happy  squalor. 
In  Naples  misery  laughs  and  sings,  and 
plays  the  Pandean  pipe,  and  enjoys  itself. 
Poverty  gayly  throws  its  bit  of  rag  over 
the  left  shoulder,  and  does  not  seem  to  per- 
ceive the  difference  between  that  and  a 
cloak  of  Genoese  velvet.  Neither  the  cruel 
past  nor  the  fateful  present  has  crushed  the 
joyousness  out  of  Naples.  It  is  the  very 
Mark  Tapley  of  cities  —  and  that,  perhaps, 
is  what  makes  it  the  most  pathetic.  But 
to  get  back  to  our  balcony. 

I  am  told  that  the  lower  classes  —  al- 
ways excepting  the  sixty  or  seventy  thou- 
sand lazzaroni,  who  have  ceased  to  exist  as 


ON  A   BALCONY.  139 

a  body,  but  continue,  as  individuals,  very 
effectively  to  prey  upon  the  stranger  —  are 
remarkable  for  their  frugal  and  industrious 
habits.  I  suppose  this  is  so,  though  the 
visible  results  which  elsewhere  usually  fol- 
low the  thriftiness  of  a  population  are  ab- 
sent from  Naples.  However,  my  personal 
observation  of  the  workingman  was  limited 
to  watching  some  masons  employed  on 
a  building  in  process  of  erection  a  little 
higher  up  on  the  opposite  side  of  the 
strada.  I  was  first  attracted  by  the  fact 
that  the  men  were  planning  the  blocks  of 
fawn -colored  stone,  and  readily  shaping 
them  with  knives,  as  if  the  stone  had  been 
cheese  or  soap.  It  was,  in  effect,  a  kind  of 
calcareous  tufa,  which  is  soft  when  newly 
quarried,  and  gradually  hardens  on  expo- 
sure. It  was  not  a  difficult  material  to  work 
in,  but  the  masons  set  to  the  task  with  that 
deliberate  care  not  to  strain  themselves 
which  I  had  admired  in  the  horny-handed 
laboring  man  in  various  parts  of  Italy.  At 


140  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

intervals  of  two  or  three  minutes  the  stone- 
cutters —  there  were  seven  of  them  — 
would  suddenly  suspend  operations,  and 
without  any  visible  cause  fall  into  a  violent 
dispute.  It  looked  as  if  they  were  coming 
to  blows ;  but  they  were  only  engaged  in 
amicable  gossip.  Perhaps  it  was  a  ques- 
tion of  the  weather,  or  of  the  price  of  mac- 
aroni, or  of  that  heartless  trick  which  Cat- 
tarina  played  upon  poor  Giuseppe  night 
before  last.  There  was  something  very 
cheerful  in  their  chatter,  of  which  I  caught 
only  the  eye-flashes  and  the  vivacious  south' 
ern  gestures  that  accompanied  it.  It  wa& 
pleasant  to  see  them  standing  there  with 
crossed  legs,  in  the  midst  of  their  honorable 
toil,  leisurely  indulging  in  graceful  banter 
at  Heaven  only  knows  how  many  francs 
per  day.  At  about  half  past  ten  o'clock 
they  abruptly  knocked  off  work  altogether 
(I  knew  it  was  coming  to  that),  and, 
stretching  themselves  out  comfortably  un« 
der  an  adjacent  shed,  went  to  sleep.  Pres 


ON  A  BALCONY,  141 

ently  a  person  —  presumably  the  foreman 
—  appeared  on  the  scene,  and  proceeded 
energetically  to  kick  the  seven  sleepers, 
who  arose  and  returned  to  their  tools.  Af- 
ter straightening  out  this  matter  the  fore- 
man departed,  and  the  masons,  dropping 
saw,  chisel,  and  fore-plane,  crawled  in  un- 
der the  shed  again.  I  smiled,  and  a  glow 
came  over  me  as  I  reflected  that  perhaps 
I  had  discovered  the  identical  branch  of 
the  Latin  race  from  which  the  American 
plumber  has  descended  to  us. 

There  is  one  class,  forming  a  very  large 
portion  of  the  seedy  population  of  Naples, 
and  the  most  estimable  portion,  to  whose 
industry,  integrity,  and  intelligence  I  can 
unreservedly  testify.  This  class,  which,  so 
far  as  I  saw,  does  all  the  hard  work  that  is 
done  and  receives  nothing  but  persecution 
in  return,  is  to  be  met  everywhere  in  Italy, 
but  nowhere  in  so  great  force  as  in  Naples. 
I  mean  those  patient,  wise  little  donkeys, 
which  are  as  barbarously  used  by  their 


142    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

masters  as  ever  their  masters  were  by  the 
Bourbons.  In  witnessing  the  senseless  cru- 
elty with  which  a  Neapolitan  treats  his  in- 
articulate superior,  one  is  almost  disposed 
to  condone  the  outrages  of  Spanish  rule. 
I  have  frequently  seen  a  fellow  beat  one  of 
the  poor  animals  with  a  club  nearly  as 
large  round  as  the  little  creature's  body. 
As  a  donkey  is  generally  its  owner's  sole 
source  of  income,  it  seems  a  rather  near- 
sighted policy  to  knock  the  breath  out  of  it. 
But,  mercifully,  the  wind  is  tempered  to  the 
shorn  lamb,  and  the  donkey  is  pachyderma- 
tous. A  blow  that  would  kill  a  horse  likely 
enough  merely  impresses  a  donkey  with 
the  idea  that  somebody  is  going  to  hit  him. 
Under  the  old  order  of  things  in  Naples  his 
insensibility  was  sometimes  outflanked  by 
removing  a  strip  of  his  hide,  thus  laying 
bare  a  responsive  spot  for  the  whip-lash ; 
but  that  stratagem  is  now  prohibited  by 
law,  I  believe.  A  donkey  with  a  particu- 
larly sensitive  place  on  him  anywhere  nat- 
urally fetches  a  high  price  at  present. 


ON  A   BALCONY.  143 

The  disproportionate  burdens  which  are 
imposed  upon  and  stoically  accepted  by  the 
Neapolitan  donkey  constantly  excite  one's 
wonder  and  pity.  As  I  sat  there  on  the 
balcony  a  tiny  cart  went  by  so  piled  with 
furniture  that  the  pigmy  which  drew  it  was 
entirely  hidden  from  sight.  The  cumber- 
some mass  had  the  appearance  of  being 
propelled  by  some  piece  of  internal  machin- 
ery. This  was  followed  by  another  cart, 
containing  the  family,  I  suppose  —  five  or 
six  stupid  persons  drawn  by  a  creature  no 
larger  than  a  St.  Bernard  dog.  I  fell  into 
a  train  of  serious  reflection  on  donkeys  in 
general,  chiefly  suggested,  I  rather  fancy, 
by  Masaniello,  who  was  still  standing  with 
his  back  against  the  sea-wall  and  his  eyes 
fixed  on  my  balcony  as  I  went  in  to  lunch. 


144          FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 


n. 

WHEN  I  returned  to  my  post  of  observa- 
tion, half  an  hour  later,  I  found  the  street 
nearly  deserted.  Naples  was  taking  its  si- 
esta. A  fierce,  hot  light  quivered  on  the 
bay  and  beat  down  on  the  silent  villas  along 
shore,  making  the  mellow-tinted  pilasters 
and  porticoes  gleam  like  snow  against  the 
dull  green  of  the  olive-trees.  The  two 
cones  of  Mount  Vesuvius,  now  wrapped  in 
a  transparent  violet  haze,  which  brought 
them  strangely  near,  had  for  background  a 
fathomless  sky  of  unclouded  azure.  Here 
and  there,  upon  a  hill-side  in  the  distance, 
small  white  houses,  with  verandas  and  bal- 
conies 

"Close  latticed  to  the  brooding  heat," 

seemed  scorching  among  their  dusty  vines. 
The  reflection  of  the  water  was  almost  in- 
tolerable. 


ON  A  BALCONY.  145 

As  I  reached  up  to  lower  the  awning 
overhead,  I  had  a  clairvoyant  consciousness 
that  some  one  was  watching  me  from  be- 
low. Whether  Masaniello  had  brought  his 
noonday  meal  of  roasted  chestnuts  with 
him,  or,  during  my  absence,  had  stolen  to 
some  low  trattoria  in  the  vicinity  to  refresh 
himself,  I  could  not  tell ;  but  there  he  was, 
in  the  act  now  of  lighting  one  of  those  long 
pipe-stem  cigars  called  Garibaldis. 

Since  he  wanted  neither  my  purse  nor 
my  person,  what  was  his  design  in  hanging 
about  the  hotel  ?  Perhaps  it  was  my  person 
he  wanted ;  perhaps  he  was  an  emissary  of 
the  police ;  but  no,  the  lowest  government 
official  in  Italy  always  wears  enough  gold- 
lace  for  a  Yankee  major-general.  Besides, 
I  was  innocent ;  I  had  n't  done  it,  whatever 
it  was.  Possibly  Masaniello  mistook  me  for 
somebody  else,  and  was  meditating  a  neat 
stiletto  stroke  or  two  if  I  ventured  out  after 
night-fall.  Indeed,  I  intended  to  go  to  the 
theatre  of  San  Carlo  that  night.  A  rush  — 
10 


146  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

a  flash  of  steel  in  the  moonlight,  an  echo- 
ing foot-fall  —  and  all  would  be  over  before 
one  could  explain  anything.  Masaniello 
was  becoming  monotonous. 

I  turned  away  from  him  to  look  at  the 
Castel  dell'  Ovo,  within  rifle  range  at  my 
left,  on  a  small  island  connected  by  an 
arched  breakwater  with  the  main-land  at 
the  foot  of  the  Pizzofalcone.  I  tried  to 
take  in  the  fact  that  this  wrinkled  pile  was 
begun  by  William  I.  in  1154,  and  com- 
pleted a  century  later  by  Frederick  II. ; 
that  here,  in  the  reign  of  Robert  the  Wise, 
came  the  witty  Giotto  to  decorate  the 
chapel  with  those  frescoes  of  which  only 
the  tradition  remains  ;  that  here  Charles 
III.  of  Durazzo  held  Queen  Joanna  a  pris- 
oner, and  was  here  besieged  by  Louis  of 
Anjou ;  that,  finally,  in  1495,  Charles  VIII. 
of  France  knocked  over  the  old  castle,  and 
Pedro  de  Toledo  set  it  up  on  its  legs  again 
in  1532.  I  tried,  but  rather  unsuccessfully, 
to  take  in  all  this,  for  though  the  castle 


ON  A  BALCONY.  147 

boasts  of  bastions  and  outworks,  it  lacks 
the  heroic  aspect.  In  fact,  it  is  now  used 
as  a  prison,  and  has  the  right  hang-dog 
look  of  prisons.  However,  I  put  my  fancy 
to  work  restoring  the  castle  to  the  strength 
and  dignity  it  wore  in  chronicler  Froissart's 
day,  and  was  about  to  attack  the  place 
with  the  assistance  of  the  aforesaid  Charles 
VIII.,  when  the  heavy  tramp  of  feet  and 
the  measured  tap  of  a  drum  chimed  in  very 
prettily  with  my  hostile  intention.  A  reg- 
iment of  infantry  was  coming  down  the 
strada. 

If  I  do  not  describe  this  regiment  as  the 
very  poorest  regiment  in  the  world,  it  is 
because  it  was  precisely  like  every  other 
body  of  Italian  soldiery  that  I  have  seen. 
The  men  were  small,  spindle-legged,  and 
slouchy.  One  might  have  taken  them  for 
raw  recruits  if  their  badly-fitting  white- 
duck  uniforms  had  not  shown  signs  of  vet- 
eran service.  As  they  wheeled  into  the 
Chiatamone,  each  man  trudging  along  at 


148          FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

his  own  gait,  they  looked  like  a  flock  of 
sheep.  The  bobbing  mass  recalled  to  my 
mind  —  by  that  law  of  contraries  which 
makes  one  thing  suggest  another  totally 
different — the  compact,  grand  swing  of  the 
New  York  Seventh  Regiment  as  it  swept 
up  Broadway  the  morning  it  returned  from 
Pennsylvania  at  the  close  of  the  draft  riots 
in  '63.  If  the  National  Guard  had  shuffled 
by  in  the  loose  Garibaldian  fashion,  I  do 
not  believe  New  York  would  have  slept 
with  so  keen  a  sense  of  security  as  it  did 
that  July  night. 

The  room  directly  under  mine  was  oc- 
cupied by  a  young  English  lady,  who,  at- 
tracted by  the  roll  of  the  drums,  stepped 
out  on  her  balcony  just  as  the  head  of  the 
column  reached  the  hotel.  In  her  innocent 
desire  to  witness  a  military  display  she 
probably  had  no  anticipation  of  the  tender 
fusillade  she  would  have  to  undergo.  That 
the  colonel  should  give  the  fair  stranger  a 
half-furtive  salute,  in  which  he  cut  nothing 


ON  A  BALCONY.  149 

in  two  with  his  sabre,  was  well  enough ; 
but  that  was  no  reason  why  every  mother's 
son  in  each  platoon  should  look  up  at  the 
balcony  as  he  passed,  and  then  turn  and 
glance  back  at  her  over  his  musket.  Yet 
this  singular  military  evolution,  which  I 
cannot  find  set  down  anywhere  in  Hardee's 
Tactics,  was  performed  by  every  man  in 
the  regiment.  That  these  ten  or  twelve 
hundred  warriors  refrained  from  kissing 
their  hands  to  the  blonde  lady  shows  the 
severe  discipline  which  prevails  in  the  Ital- 
ian army.  Possibly  there  was  not  a  man  of 
them,  from  the  colonel's  valet  down  to  the 
colonel  himself,  who  did  not  march  off  with 
the  conviction  that  he  had  pierced  that 
blue  muslin  wrapper  somewhere  in  the  re- 
gion of  the  left  breast.  I  must  relate  that 
the  modest  young  Englishwoman  stood  this 
enfilading  fire  admirably,  though  it  made 
white  and  red  roses  of  her  complexion. 

The  rear  of  the  column  was  brought  up, 
and  emphasized,  if  I  may  say  it,  by  an  ex- 


150    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTK. 

clamation  point  in  the  shape  of  a  personage 
so  richly  gilded  and  of  such  gorgeous  plu- 
mage that  I  should  instantly  have  accepted 
him  as  the  King  of  Italy  if  I  had  not  long 
ago  discovered  that  fine  feathers  do  not  al- 
ways make  fine  birds.  It  was  only  the  reg- 
imental physician.  Of  course  he  tossed  up 
a  couple  of  pill-like  eyes  to  the  balcony  as 
he  strutted  by,  with  his  plume  standing  out 
horizontally  —  like  that  thin  line  of  black 
smoke  which  just  then  caught  my  attention 
in  the  offing. 

This  was  the  smoke  from  the  pipe  of 
the  funny  little  steamer  which  runs  from 
Naples  to  Sorrento,  and  thence  to  Capri, 
where  it  drops  anchor  for  so  brief  a  space 
that  you  are  obliged  to  choose  between  a 
scramble  up  the  rocks  to  the  villa  of  Tibe- 
rius and  a  visit  in  a  small  boat  to  the  Blue 
Grotto,  that  "  sapphire  shell  of  the  Siren  of 
Naples,"  as  Quinet  neatly  calls  it.  The 
steamer  is  supposed  to  leave  the  Chiaia  at 
Naples  every  morning  at  a  stated  hour; 


ON  A  BALCONY.  151 

but  you  need  not  set  your  heart  on  going 
to  Capri  by  that  steamer  on  any  particular 
day.  It  goes  or  not  just  as  the  captain  hap- 
pens to  feel  about  it  when  the  time  comes. 
A  cinder  in  his  eye,  a  cold  in  his  head,  a 
conjugal  tiff  over  his  polenta  —  in  fine,  any 
insignificant  thing  is  apparently  sufficient 
to  cause  him  to  give  up  the  trip.  It  is  only 
moderate  satisfaction  you  get  out  of  him  on 
these  occasions.  He  throws  his  arms  de- 
spairingly in  the  air,  and  making  forked 
lightning  with  his  fingers  cries,  "  Ah,  mer- 
cy of  God !  no  —  we  sail  not  this  day !  " 
Then  wildly  beating  his  forehead  with  his 
knuckles,  "  To-morrow,  yes  !  "  There  is 
ever  a  pleasing  repose  of  manner  hi  an  ex- 
cited Italian. 

I  suspect  the  truth  is  that  some  of  the 
directors  of  the  steamboat  company  are  me- 
diaeval saints,  and  that  the  anniversaries  of 
their  birthdays  or  their  deathdays  interfere 
with  business.  The  captain  is  an  excellent 
fellow  of  his  sort,  and  extremely  devout, 


152     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

though  that  does  not  prevent  him  from  now 
and  then  playing  a  very  scurvy  trick  upon 
his  passengers.  Of  course  one's  main  ob- 
ject in  going  to  Capri  is  to  see  the  Blue 
Grotto,  the  entrance  to  which  is  through  a 
small  arch  scarcely  three  feet  high  in  the 
face  of  the  rock.  With  the  sea  perfectly 
tranquil,  you  are  obliged  to  bow  your  head 
or  lie  down  in  the  wherry  while  passing  in  ; 
but  with  a  north  or  west  wind  breathing,  it 
is  impossible  to  enter  at  all.  When  this 
chances  to  be  the  case  the  captain  is  care- 
ful not  to  allude  to  the  matter,  but  smil- 
ingly allows  you  to  walk  aboard,  and  piti- 
lessly takes  you  out  under  a  scorching  sky 
to  certain  disappointment  and  a  clam-bake, 
in  which  you  perform  the  r81e  of  the  clam. 
Through  my  glass  I  could  see  the  little 
egg-shell  of  a  steamer,  which  for  some  rea- 
son had  come  to  a  stop  in  the  middle  of  the 
bay,  with  a  thread  of  smoke  issuing  from 
her  funnel  and  embroidering  itself  in  fan- 
ciful patterns  on  the  sunny  atmosphere.  I 


ON  A  BALCONY.  153 

knew  how  hot  it  was  over  there,  and  I 
knew  that  the  light  westerly  breeze  which 
crisped  the  water  and  became  a  suffocating 
breath  before  it  reached  shore  had  sealed 
up  the  Grotta  Azzurra  for  that  day.  I  pic- 
tured the  pleasure-seekers  scattered  about 
the  heated  deck,  each  dejectedly  munch- 
ing his  Dead  Sea  apple  of  disappointment. 
The  steamer  was  evidently  getting  under 
way  again,  for  the  thread  of  smoke  had 
swollen  into  a  black,  knotted  cable.  Pres- 
ently a  faint  whistle  came  across  the  water 
—  as  if  a  ghost  were  whistling  somewhere 
in  the  distance  —  and  the  vessel  went  puff- 
ing away  towards  Castellamare.  If  the 
Emperor  Tiberius  Claudius  Nero  Caesar 
could  have  looked  down  just  then  from  the 
cloudy  battlements  of  Capri,  what  would 
he  have  thought  of  that ! 

The  great  squares  of  shadow  cast  upon 
the  street  by  the  hotel  and  the  adjoining 
buildings  were  deepening  by  degrees.  Fit- 
ful puffs  of  air  came  up  from  the  bay  —  the 


154     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

early  precursors  of  that  refreshing  breeze 
which  the  Mediterranean  sends  to  make 
the  summer  twilights  of  Naples  delicious. 
Now  and  then  a  perfume  was  wafted  to  the 
balcony,  as  if  the  wind  had  stolen  a  hand- 
ful of  scents  from  some  high-walled  inclo- 
sure  of  orange-trees  and  acacias,  and  flung 
it  at  me.  The  white  villas,  set  in  their 
mosaic  of  vines  on  the  distant  hill-side,  had 
a  cooler  look  than  they  wore  earlier  in  the 
day.  The  heat  was  now  no  longer  oppres^ 
sive,  but  it  made  one  drowsy — that  and 
the  sea  air.  An  hour  or  more  slipped  away 
from  me  unawares.  Meanwhile,  the  tide  of 
existence  had  risen  so  imperceptibly  at  my 
feet  that  I  was  surprised,  on  looking  down, 
suddenly  to  find  the  strada  flooded  with 
streams  of  carriages  and  horsemen  and  pe- 
destrians. All  the  gay  life  of  Naples,  that 
had  lain  dormant  through  the  heavy  noon, 
had  awakened,  like  the  princess  in  the  en- 
chanted palace,  to  take  up  the  laugh  where 
it  left  off  and  order  fresh  ices  at  the  cafe's. 


ON  A  BALCONY.  155 

I  had  a  feeling  that  Masaniello  —  he  was 
still  there — was  somehow  at  the  bottom  of 
all  this  ;  that  by  some  diablerie  of  his,  may 
be  with  the  narcotic  fumes  of  that  black 
cigar,  he  had  thrown  the  city  into  the  leth- 
argy from  which  it  was  now  recovering. 

The  crowd,  which  flowed  in  two  oppos- 
ing currents  past  the  hotel,  was  a  gayer  and 
more  smartly  dressed  throng  than  that  of 
the  morning.  Certain  shabby  aspects,  how- 
ever, were  not  wanting,  for  donkey  carts 
mingled  themselves  jauntily  with  the  more 
haughty  equipages  on  their  way  to  the  Riv- 
iera di  Chiaia,  the  popular  drive.  There 
were  beautiful  brown  women,  with  heavy- 
fringed  eyes,  in  these  carriages,  and  now 
and  then  a  Neapolitan  dandy  —  a  creature 
sui  generis  —  rode  along-side  on  horseback. 
Every  human  thing  that  can  scrape  a  ve- 
hicle together  goes  to  the  Riviera  di  Chiaia 
of  a  fine  afternoon.  It  is  a  magnificent 
wide  avenue,  open  on  one  side  to  the  bay, 
and  lined  on  the  other  with  palaces  and 


156          FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

villas  and  hotels.  The  road  leads  to  the 
Grotto  of  Posilippo,  and  to  endless  marvels 
beyond  —  the  tomb  of  Virgil,  Lake  Aver- 
nus,  Baise,  CumsB,  a  Hellenic  region  among 
whose  ruins  wander  the  sorrowful  shades  of 
the  gods.  But  the  afternoon  idler  is  not 
likely  to  get  so  far ;  after  a  turn  or  two  on 
the  promenade,  he  is  content  to  sit  under 
the  trees  in  the  garden  of  the  Villa  Nazio- 
nale,  sipping  his  sherbet  dashed  with  snow, 
and  listening  to  the  band. 

I  saw  more  monks  this  day  than  I  met  in 
a  week  at  Rome,  their  natural  headquar- 
ters ;  but  in  Naples,  as  in  the  Eternal  City, 
they  are  generally  not  partial  to  busy  thor- 
oughfares. I  think  some  religious  festival 
must  have  been  going  on  in  a  church  near 
the  Chiatamone.  A  solemn,  dark-robed  fig- 
ure gliding  in  and  out  among  the  merry 
crowd  had  a  queer,  pictorial  effect,  and 
gave  me  an  incongruous  twelfth-century 
sort  of  sensation.  Once  a  file  of  monks  — 
I  do  not  remember  ever  seeing  so  many  to- 


ON  A  BALCONY.  157 

gether  outside  a  convent  —  passed  swiftly 
under  the  balcony.  I  was  near  tumbling 
into  the  Middle  Ages,  when  their  tonsured 
heads  reminded  me  of  that  row  of  venera- 
ble elderly  gentlemen  one  always  sees  in 
the  front  orchestra  chairs  at  the  ballet,  and 
I  was  thus  happily  dragged  back  into  my 
own  cycle. 

It  was  a  noisy,  light-hearted,  holiday  peo- 
ple that  streamed  through  the  strada  in  the 
waning  sunshine ;  they  required  no  police- 
man, as  a  similar  crowd  in  England  or 
America  would  have  done ;  their  merri- 
ment was  as  harmless  as  that  of  so  many 
birds,  though  no  doubt  there  was  in  these 
laughing  throngs  plenty  of  the  dangerous 
stuff  out  of  which  graceful  brigands  and 
picturesque  assassins  are  made.  But  it  was 
easier  and  pleasanter  to  discover  here  and 
there  a  face  or  a  form  such  as  the  old  mas- 
ters loved  to  paint.  I  amused  myself  in  se- 
lecting models  for  new  pictures  by  Titian 
and  Raphael  and  Carlo  Dolci  and  Doineni- 


158     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

chino,  to  take  the  places  of  those  madonnas 
and  long-tressed  mistresses  of  which  noth- 
ing will  remain  in  a  few  centuries.  What 
will  Italy  be  when  she  has  lost  her  master- 
pieces, as  she  has  lost  the  art  that  pro- 
duced them  ?  To-day  she  is  the  land  of 
paintings,  without  any  painters,  the  empty 
cradle  of  poets. 

I  do  not  know  that  anything  in  the 
lively  street  entertained  me  more  than  the 
drivers  of  the  public  carriages.  Like  all 
the  common  Neapolitans,  the  Jehus  have  a 
wonderful  gift  of  telegraphing  with  their 
fingers.  It  is  not  a  question  of  words  la- 
boriously spelled  out,  but  of  a  detailed 
statement  in  a  flash.  They  seem  to  be  able 
to  do  half  an  hour's  talking  in  a  couple  of 
seconds.  A  fillip  of  the  finger-joint,  and 
there's  a  sentence  for  you  as  long  as  one  of 
Mr.  Carlyle's.  At  least,  that  is  my  idea  of 
it ;  it  is  merely  conjecture  on  my  part,  for 
though  I  have  frequently  formed  the  topic 
of  a  conversation  carried  on  in  this  style 


ON  A  BALCONY.  159 

under  my  very  nose,  I  never  succeeded  in 
overhearing  anything.  I  have  undoubtedly 
been  anathematized,  and  barely  probable, 
been  complimented ;  but  in  those  instances, 
like  Horatio,  I  took  fortune's  buffets  and 
rewards  with  equal  thanks.  It  is  diverting 
to  see  two  of  these  fellows  meeting  at  a 
breakneck  pace  and  exchanging  verdicts  on 
their  respective  passengers.  May  be  one, 
with  a  gesture  like  lightning,  says :  "  I  've 
a  rich  English  milor  ;  he  has  n't  asked  for 
my  tariff ;  I  shall  bleed  him  beautifully, 
per  Bacco ! "  At  the  same  instant  the 
other  possibly  hurls  back  :  "  No  such  luck ! 
A  pair  of  foolish  American!,  but  they  've  a 
pig  of  a  courier  who  pockets  all  the  buo- 
namano  himself,  the  devil  fly  away  with 
him ! "  Thus  they  meet,  and  indulge  in 
their  simple  prattle,  and  are  out  of  each 
other's  sight,  all  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye. 


160     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 


m. 


THE  twilights  in  Southern  Italy  fall  sud- 
denly, and  are  of  brief  duration.  While  I 
was  watching  the  darkening  shadow  of  the 
hotel  on  the  opposite  sea-wall,  the  dusk 
closed  in,  and  the  street  began  rapidly  to 
empty  itself.  A  curtain  of  mist  was  al- 
ready stretched  from  headland  to  headland, 
shutting  out  the  distant  objects.  Here  and 
there  on  a  jutting  point  a  light  blossomed, 
its  duplicate  glassed  in  the  water,  as  if  the 
fiery  flower  had  dropped  a  petal.  Presently 
there  were  a  hundred  lights,  and  then  a 
thousand,  fringing  the  crescented  shore. 

On  our  leaving  Rome,  the  landlord  had 
pathetically  warned  us  of  the  fatal  effects 
of  the  night  air  in  Naples,  just  as  our  Nea- 
politan host,  at  a  later  date,  let  fall  some 
disagreeable  hints  about  the  Roman  mala- 


ON  A  BALCONY.  161 

ria.  They  both  were  right.  In  this  deli- 
cious land  Death  shrouds  himself  in  the  dew 
and  lurks  in  all  gentle  things.  The  breeze 
from  the  bay  had  a  sudden  chill  in  it  now ; 
the  dampness  of  the  atmosphere  was  as 
heavy  as  a  fine  rain.  I  pushed  back  my 
chair  on  the  balcony,  and  then  I  lingered  a 
moment  to  see  the  moon  rising  over  Capri. 
Then  I  saw  how  that  bay,  with  its  dread- 
ful mountain,  was  lovelier  than  anything 
on  earth.  I  turned  from  it  reluctantly,  and 
as  I  glanced  into  the  silent  street  beneath, 
there  was  Masaniello,  a  black  silhouette 
against  the  silvery  moonlight. 
11 


vn. 
SMITH. 


vn. 

SMITH. 

AN  old  acquaintance  of  mine,  who  has 
gone  away  into  the  dark  with  all  his  mirth- 
ful sayings,  once  described  an  English  ser- 
vant as  "  the  valet  of  the  Shadow  of  Death." 
The  mot  was  said  not  to  be  original  with 
my  friend,  but  I  have  heard  so  many  bril- 
liant things  from  those  same  lips  that  I  do 
not  care  to  go  further  in  search  of  an  owner 
for  what  is  sufficiently  characteristic  of  him 
to  be  his.  Whoever  first  said  it  gave  us 
in  a  single  phrase  the  most  perfect  croquis 
that  ever  was  made  of  the  English  serving- 
man.  We  all  know  him  in  the  English 
novel  of  the  period,  and  some  of  us  know 
him  in  the  flesh.  I  chance  myself  to  be 
familiar  with  a  mild  form  of  him.  I  speak 
of  him  as  if  he  were  a  disease  :  in  his  most 


166     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

aggravated  type  I  should  say  he  might  be 
considered  as  an  affliction.  Thackeray  — 
the  satirist  and  biographer,  the  Pope  and 
Plutarch,  of  Jeemes  —  frankly  admitted  he 
was  afraid  of  the  creature.  That  kindly 
keen  blue  eye,  which  saw  through  the 
shams  and  follies  of  Mayfair,  was  wont  to 
droop  under  the  stony  stare  of  his  host's 
butler.  I  hasten  to  confess  to  only  a  lim- 
ited personal  knowledge  of  the  august  be- 
ing in  plush  small-clothes  and  pink  silk 
stockings  who  presides  over  the  grand 
houses  in  England,  for  I  carried  my  pil- 
grim's wallet  into  few  grand  houses  there  ; 
but  I  have  had  more  or  less  to  do  with 
certain  humble  brothers  of  his,  who  are 
leading  lives  of  highly  respectable  gloom 
in  sundry  English  taverns  and  hotels. 

It  is  one  of  these  less  dazzling  brothers 
who  furnishes  me  with  the  motif  of  this 
brief  study.  More  fortunate  than  that  Ro- 
man emperor  who  vainly  longed  to  have  all 
his  enemies  consolidated  into  a  single  neck, 


SMITH.  167 

I  have  secured  in  a  person  named  Smith 
the  epitome  of  an  entire  class  —  not,  in- 
deed, with  the  cruel  intent  of  dispatching 
him,  but  of  photographing  him.  I  should 
decline  to  take  Smith's  head  by  any  less 
gentle  method. 

In  London  there  is  a  kind  of  hotel  of 
which  we  have  no  counterpart  in  the 
United  States.  This  hotel  is  usually  lo- 
cated in  some^  semi-aristocratic  side  street, 
and  wears  no  badge  of  its  servitude  beyond 
a  large,  well-kept  brass  door-plate,  bearing 
the  legend  "  Jones's  Hotel "  or  "  Brown's 
Hotel,"  as  the  ease  may  be;  but  be  it 
Brown  or  Jones,  he  has  been  dead  at  least 
fifty  years,  and  the  establishment  is  con- 
ducted by  Robinson.  There  is  no  coffee- 
room  or  public  dining-room,  or  even  office, 
in  this  hotel ;  the  commercial  traveller  is 
an  unknown  quantity  there ;  your  meals 
are  served  in  your  apartments ;  the  furni- 
ture is  solid  and  comfortable,  the  attend- 
ance admirable,  the  cuisine  unexception- 


168  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PE8TH. 

able,  and  the  bill  abominable.  But  for 
ease,  quietness,  and  a  sort  of  1812  odor  of 
respectability,  this  hotel  has  nothing  to 
compare  with  it  in  the  wide  world.  It  is 
here  that  the  intermittent  homesickness 
you  contracted  on  the  Continent  will  be 
lifted  out  of  your  bosom  ;  it  is  here  will  be 
unfolded  to  you  alluring  vistas  of  the  sub- 
stantial comforts  that  surround  the  private 
lives  of  prosperous  Britons ;  it  is  here, 
above  all,  that  you  will  be  brought  in  con- 
tact with  Smith. 

It   was  on   our   arrival  in   London,   one 
April   afternoon,    that    the   door   of   what 

looked  like  a  private  mansion,  in   D 

Street,  was  thrown  open  to  us  by  a  boy 
broken  out  all  over  with  buttons.  Behind 
this  boy  stood  Smith.  I  call  him  simply 
Smith  for  two  reasons :  in  the  first  place 
because  it  is  convenient  to  do  so,  and  in  the 
second  place  because  that  is  what  he  called 
himself.  I  wish  it  were  as  facile  a  matter 
to  explain  how  this  seemingly  unobtrusive 


SMITH.  169 

person  instantly  took  possession  of  us,  bul- 
lied us  with  his  usefulness,  and  knocked  us 
down  with  his  urbanity.  From  the  mo- 
ment he  stepped  forward  to  relieve  us  of 
our  hand-luggage,  we  were  his  —  and  re- 
mained his  until  that  other  moment,  some 
weeks  later,  when  he  handed  us  our  parcels 
again,  and  stood  statuesque  on  the  door- 
step, with  one  finger  lifted  to  his  forehead 
in  decorous  salute,  as  we  drove  away.  Ah, 
what  soft  despotism  was  that  which  was 
exercised  for  no  other  end  than  to  antici- 
pate our  requirements  —  to  invent  new 
wants  for  us  only  to  satisfy  them  !  If  I 
anywhere  speak  lightly  of  Smith,  if  I  take 
exception  to  his  preternatural  gravity  (of 
which  I  would  not  have  him  moult  a 
feather),  if  I  allude  invidiously  to  his  life- 
long struggle  with  certain  rebellious  letters 
of  the  alphabet,  it  is  out  of  sheer  envy  and 
regret  that  we  have  nothing  like  him  in 
America.  We  have  Niagara,  and  the  Yo- 
semite,  and  Edison's  Electric  Light  (or  shall 


170    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

have  it,  when  we  get  it),  but  we  have  no 
trained  serving-men  like  Smith.  He  is  the 
result  of  older  and  vastly  more  complex 
social  conditions  than  ours.  His  training 
began  in  the  feudal  ages.  An  atmosphere 
charged  with  machicolated  battlements  and 
cathedral  spires  was  necessary  to  his  per- 
fect development,  —  that,  and  generation 
after  generation  of  lords  and  princes  and 
wealthy  country-gentlemen  for  him  to  prac- 
tice on.  He  is  not  possible  in  New  Eng- 
land. The  very  cut  of  his  features  is  un- 
known among  us.  It  has  been  remarked 
that  each  trade  and  profession  has  its  phys- 
iognomy, its  own  proper  face.  If  you  look 
closely  you  will  detect  a  family  likeness 
running  through  the  portraits  of  Garrick 
and  Kean  and  Booth  and  Irving.  There 's 
the  self-same  sabre-like  flash  in  the  eye  of 
Maryborough  and  Bonaparte  —  the  same 
resolute  labial  expression.  Every  lackey 
in  London  might  be  the  son  or  brother  of 
any  other  lackey.  Smith's  father,  and  his 


SMITH.  171 

father's  father,  and  so  on  back  to  the  gray 
dawn  of  England,  were  serving-men,  and 
each  in  turn  has  been  stamped  with  the  im- 
mutable trade-mark  of  his  class.  Waiters 
(like  poets)  are  born,  not  made ;  and  they 
have  not  had  time  to  be  born  in  America. 

As  a  shell  that  has  the  care  of  inclosing 
a  pearl  like  Smith,  Jones's  Hotel  demands 
a  word  or  two  of  more  particular  descrip- 
tion. The  narrow  little  street  in  which  it 
is  situated  branches  off  from  a  turbulent 
thoroughfare,  and  is  quite  packed  with  his- 
torical, social,  and  literary  traditions.  Here, 
at  the  close  of  his  days,  dwelt  the  learned 
and  sweet-minded  philosopher,  John  Eve- 
lyn, the  contemporary  and  friend  of  every- 
body's friend,  Mr.  Samuel  Pepys,  of  the 
admiralty.  I  like  to  think  of  Evelyn  turn- 
ing out  of  busy  Piccadilly  into  this  more 
quiet  precinct,  accompanied,  perhaps,  by 
the  obsequious  Samuel  himself.  According 
to  Jesse,  the  witty  Dr.  Arburthnot  also  re- 
sided here,  after  the  death  of  his  royal  pa- 


172  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

troness,  Queen  Anne,  had  driven  him  from 
his  snug  quarters  in  St.  James's  Palace. 
Hither  came  Pope,  Swift,  Gray,  Parnell, 
Prior,  and  a  flock  of  other  singing-birds  and 
brilliant  wits  to  visit  the  worthy  doctor. 
As  I  sit  of  an  evening  in  our  parlor,  which 
is  on  a  level  with  the  sidewalk,  the  ghostly 
echo  of  those  long-silent  footfalls  is  more 
distinct  to  my  ear  than  the  tread  of  the  liv- 
ing passers-by.  The  earthly  abiding  places 
of  obsolete  notabilities  are  very  thick  in 
this  neighborhood.  A  few  minutes'  walk 
takes  you  to  the  ugly  walled  mansion  that 
once  held  the  beauty,  but  could  not  hold 
all  the  radiance,  of  Georgiana  Duchess  of 
Devonshire,  and  a  little  further  on  is  Ap- 
sley  House. 

But  we  need  not  wander.     D Street 

still  has  high  pretensions  of  its  own.  I 
take  it  that  several  families  whose  conse- 
quence is  to  be  found  in  Debrett's  Peerage 
have  their  town-houses  here.  Over  the 
sculptured  door-way  of  a  sombre  edifice 


SMITH.  173 

which  sets  somewhat  back  behind  a  tower- 
ing iron  grille  with  gilded  spear-heads,  I 
have  noticed  a  recently  hung  hatchment  — 
an  intimation  that  death  is  no  respecter  of 
English  nobility.  At  the  curb-stone  of  a 
spacious,  much-curtained  mansion  directly 
opposite  the  hotel,  there  is  a  constant  ar- 
rival and  departure  of  broughams  and  lan- 
daus, with  armorial  blazons  and  powdered 
footmen.  From  these  carriages  descend 
bewitching  slips  of  English  maidenhood 
with  peach-bloom  complexions,  and  richly- 
dressed,  portly  dowagers  shod  with  per- 
fectly flat-soled  shoes.  But  I  confess  that 
the  periodical  rattling  by  of  a  little  glazed 
cart  lettered  "  Scarlet  the  Butcher  "  inter- 
ests me  more ;  for  no  mortal  reason,  I  sup- 
pose, except  that  Scarlet  seems  a  phenom- 
enally appropriate  name  for  a  gentleman 
in  his  line  of  business. 

I  am  afraid  my  description  of  Jones's 
Hotel  is  very  like  one  of  those  old  Spanish 
comedies, 


174  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

"  In  which  you  see, 

As  Lope  says,  the  history  of  the  world, 
Brought  down  from  Genesis  to  the  Day  of  Judgment." 

The  building  itself,  arguing  from  the  thick- 
ness of  the  walls  and  the  antiquated  style  of 
the  interior  wood-work,  must  have  stood  its 
ground  a  great  many  years.  I  do  not  know 
how  long  it  has  been  a  hotel ;  perhaps  for 
the  better  part  of  a  century.  In  the  first 
instance  it  was  doubtless  the  home  of  some 
titled  family.  I  indulge  the  fancy  that 
there  was  a  lot  of  lovely,  high-bred  daugh- 
ters, who  drew  gay  company  here.  The 
large,  lofty-studded  rooms  were  meant  for 
an  opulent,  hospitable  kind  of  life  to  in- 
habit them.  Opening  on  the  wide  hall  — 
where  Buttons  is  always  sitting,  a  perfect 
young  Cerberus,  waiting  for  the  door-bell 
to  ring  —  is  a  small  dressing-cabinet,  in 
which,  I  make  no  question,  his  lordship 
has  many  a  time  sworn  like  a  pirate  over 
the  extravagance  of  the  girls.  I  know  he 
has  discharged  the  butler  there.  A  fitful, 


SMITH.  175 

evasive  odor,  as  of  faded  rose-leaves  in  a 
forgotten  drawer,  seems  to  linger  in  these 
chambers,  and  I  think  there  are  hints  in 
the  air  of  old-time  laughter  and  of  sobs 
that  have  long  since  hushed  themselves  into 
silence.  The  parlor  is  full  of  suggestions 
to  me,  especially  at  twilight,  before  the 
candles  are  brought  in.  Sometimes  I  can 
almost  hear  a  muffled,  agitated  voice  mur- 
muring out  of  the  Past,  "  Leave  me,  Bel- 
lamore  !  "  and  I  have  an  impression  that 
he  did  n't  leave  her.  How  could  he,  with 
those  neat  diamond  buckles  glistening  at 
her  instep,  and  her  pretty  brown  hair 
frosted  with  silver  powder,  and  that  dis- 
tracting dot  of  court-plaster  stuck  near  the 
left  corner  of  her  rosy  mouth !  The  old 
walls  are  very  discreet,  not  to  say  incom- 
municative, on  this  subject ;  it  is  not  for 
them  to  betray  the  joys  and  sorrows  and 
sins  of  yesterday,  and  I  have  to  evolve 
these  matters  out  of  my  own  synthetic  im- 
agination. But  I  am  certain  that  Bella- 
more  did  n't  leave  her  ! 


176     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

Overhead  there  are  suites  of  apartments 
identical  with  our  own,  and  I  believe  they 
are  occupied  —  by  serious-minded  families 
of  phantoms ;  they  come  and  go  so  softly. 
There  is  no  loud  talking  on  the  staircase, 
no  slamming  of  doors,  no  levity  of  any 
description  among  the  inmates  of  this  hos- 
telry. Whoever  comes  here  finds  his  na- 
ture subdued  to  the  color  of  his  surround- 
ings, like  the  dyer's  hand.  The  wildest 
guest  shortly  succumbs  to  the  soothing  in- 
fluence of  Smith.  He  pervades  the  place 
like  an  atmosphere,  and  fits  it  so  perfectly 
that,  without  jarring  on  the  present,  he 
seems  a  figure  projected  out  of  that  dusky 
past  which  has  lured  me  too  long,  and  will 
catch  me  again  before  we  get  through. 

Smith  is  a  man  of  about  forty,  but  so 
unassuming  that  I  do  not  think  he  would 
assume  to  be  so  old  or  so  young  as  that : 
tall  and  straight,  with  scant,  faded  brown 
hair  parted  in  the  middle,  and  a  deferential 
cough ;  clammy  blue  eyes,  thin  lips,  a  sed- 


SMITH.  177 

entary  complexion,  and  careful  side-whis- 
kers. He  is  always  in  evening  dress,  and 
wears  white  cotton  gloves,  which  set  your 
teeth  on  edge,  during  dinner  service.  He 
is  a  person  whose  gravity  of  deportment  is 
such  as  to  lend  seriousness  to  the  coal-scut- 
tle when  he  replenishes  the  parlor  fire  —  a 
ceremony  which  the  English  April  makes 
imperative,  the  English  April  being  as  raw 
as  an  American  February. 

Smith's  respect  for  you,  at  least  its  out- 
ward manifestation,  is  accompanied  by  a 
deep,  unexpressed  respect  for  himself.  He 
not  only  knows  his  own  place,  but  he 
knows  yours,  and  holds  you  to  it.  He  is 
incapable  of  venturing  on  a  familiarity,  or 
of  submitting  to  one.  He  can  wrap  up 
more  pitying  disapprobation  in  a  scarcely 
perceptible  curl  of  his  nether  lip  than  an- 
other man  could  express  in  a  torrent  of 
words.  I  have  gone  about  London  a  whole 
forenoon  with  one  of  Smith's  thin  smiles 
clinging  like  a  blister  to  my  consciousness. 
12 


178    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

He  is  not  taciturn,  but  lie  gives  you  the  im- 
pression of  unconquerable  reserve.  Though 
he  seldom  speaks,  except  to  answer  an  in- 
quiry, he  has  managed  in  some  occult  fash- 
ion to  permeate  us  with  a  knowledge  of  his 
domestic  environment.  For  the  soul  of  me, 
I  cannot  say  how  I  came  by  the  informa- 
tion that  Smith  married  Lady  Hadelaide 
Scarborough's  first  maid  twelve  years  ago, 
nor  in  what  manner  I  got  hold  of  the  idea 
that  Lady  Hadelaide  Scarborough's  first 
maid"  rather  stooped  from  her  social  status 
when  she  formed  a  matrimonial  alliance 
with  him.  Yet  these  facts  are  undeniably 
in  my  possession.  I  also  understand  that 
Smith  regards  Mrs.  Smith  —  who  quitted 
service  at  the  time  of  this  mesalliance  — 
as  a  sort  of  fragment  (a  little  finger-joint, 
if  that  will  help  convey  my  meaning)  of 
Lady  Hadelaide  herself.  There 's  an  air 
of  very  good  society  about  Smith.  He  evi- 
dently has  connecting  tendrils  with  beings 
who,  if  they  are  not  roses  themselves,  have 


SMITH.  179 

the  privilege  of  constituting  the  dust  at  the 
roses'  feet.  If  Smith  were  to  make  any 
statement  to  me  concerning  the  movements 
of  Royalty,  I  should  believe  him.  If  he 
were  to  confide  to  me  that  Her  Majesty, 
accompanied  by  the  Princess  Beatrice, 
walked  for  a  few  seconds  yesterday  after- 
noon on  the  terrace  at  Windsor,  I  should 
know  it  was  so,  even  if  I  failed  to  see  the 
event  recorded  in  The  Tunes. 

Smith  has  been  very  near  to  Royalty. 
To  be  sure,  it  was  fallen  royalty,  so  I  shall 
waste  no  capital  letters  on  it.  It  fell  at 
Sedan,  and  picked  itself  up  in  a  manner, 
and  came  over  to  London,  where  Smith 
had  the  bliss  of  waiting  upon  it.  "  The 
Hemperor  was  a  very  civil-spoken  gentle- 
man," observed  Smith,  detailing  the  cir- 
cumstances with  an  air  of  respectful  pa- 
tronage, and  showing  that  he  had  a  nice 
sense  of  the  difference  between  an  English 
sovereign  and  an  uncurrent  Napoleon. 

The  plain  truth  is  that  Smith  is  an  ar- 


180  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

rant  gossip  about  himself  without  in  the 
least  having  the  appearance  of  it.  He  so 
ingeniously  embroiders  bits  of  his  autobiog- 
raphy on  alien  textures  that  one  is  apt  to 
get  a  detail  or  two  quite  unawares.  I  do 
not  know  how  or  when  six  little  Smiths 
glided  into  my  intelligence  (they  cost  me 
a  shilling  a  head),  but  I  think  it  was  in 
connection  with  an  inquiry  on  my  part  as 
to  what  hour  the  morning  train  left  Pad- 
dington  Station  for  Stratford-upon-Avon. 
Two  nights  out  of  the  week  Smith  retires 
to  his  domestic  domicile ;  situated,  I  infer, 
in  some  remote  suburb  of  London,  for  he 
always  takes  a  bag  with  him  —  a  respect- 
able, drab-colored  hand-bag,  with  a  mono- 
gram on  it.  At  a  little  distance  the  twisted 
initials,  in  raised  worsted,  resemble  a  re- 
duced copy  of  the  Laocoon,  the  prominent 
serpentine  S  having,  I  suspect,  no  small 
share  in  producing  that  effect.  I  somehow 
pose  and  mix  up  the  six  little  Smiths  in 
this  monogram. 


SMITH.  181 

I  have  said  that  Smith  took  possession  of 
our  party  immediately  on  its  arrival  at 
Jones's  Hotel,  but  we  were  not  at  once 
conscious  of  the  fact.  We  had  arrived 
there  in  high  spirits,  glad  to  have  left  a  te- 
dious sea-voyage  behind  us,  and  rejoiced  to 
find  ourselves  in  London  —  the  London  we 
had  dreamed  of  these  ten  or  twenty  years. 
But  presently  we  felt  there  was  something 
in  the  temperature  that  chilled  our  vivac- 
ity. We  were  a  thousand  miles  from  sus- 
pecting what  it  was.  Our  purpose  in  Lon- 
don was  to  see  the  sights,  to  visit  all  those 
historic  buildings  and  monuments  and  gal- 
leries which  were  wrested  from  us  by  the 
war  of  1776.  Our  wanderings  through  the 
day  were  often  long  and  always  fatiguing ; 
we  returned  jaded  to  the  hotel,  frequently 
after  the  dinner  hour,  and  in  no  mood  to 
undertake  radical  changes  in  our  costume. 
There  stood  Smith  in  his  crisp  neck-tie  and 
claw-hammer  coat  and  immaculate  gloves. 
The  dinner  was  elegant  in  its  appoint- 


182     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ments,  and  exquisitely  served.  The  dress- 
ing of  the  salad  was  rivalled  only  by  the 
dressing  of  Smith.  Yet  something  was 
wrong.  We  were  somehow  repressed,  and 
for  three  days  we  did  not  know  what  it  was 
that  repressed  us.  On  the  fourth  day  I  re- 
solved to  give  our  party  a  little  surprise  by 
appearing  at  dinner  in  conventional  broad- 
cloth and  white  breastplate.  Each  of  the 
other  two  members  of  the  coterie  —  insen- 
sibly under  the  magnetism  of  Smith  —  had 
planned  a  like  surprise.  When  we  met  at 
table  and  surveyed  each  other,  we  laughed 
aloud  —  for  the  first  time  in  three  days  in 
Smith's  presence.  It  was  plain  to  see  that 
Smith  approved  of  an  elaborate  dinner 
toilette,  and  henceforth  we  adopted  it. 

Presently  we  were  struck,  and  then  be- 
gan to  be  appalled,  by  the  accuracy,  mi- 
nuteness, and  comprehensiveness  of  Smith's 
knowledge  of  London.  It  was  encyclopse- 
dic.  He  was  a  vitalized  time-table  of  rail- 
ways and  coaches  and  steamboats,  a  walk- 


SMITH.  183 

ing,  breathing  directory  to  all  the  shops, 
parks,  churches,  museums,  and  theatres  of 
the  bewildering  Babylon.  He  had,  stamped 
on  his  brain,  a  map  of  all  the  tangled  omni- 
bus routes  ;  he  knew  the  best  seats  in  every 
place  of  amusement,  the  exact  moment  the 
performance  began  in  each,  and  could  put 
his  finger  without  hesitating  a  second  on 
the  very  virtuoso's  collection  you  wanted 
to  examine.  This  is  not  the  half  of  his  ac- 
complishments. I  despair  of  stating  them. 
I  do  not  see  how  he  ever  had  the  leisure  to 
collect  such  a  mass  of  detail.  It  seems  to 
substantiate  a  theory  I  have  that  Smith 
has  existed,  with  periodic  renewals  of  his 
superficial  structure,  from  the  time  of  the 
Norman  Conquest.  Before  we  discovered 
his  almost  wicked  amplitude  of  informa- 
tion, we  used  to  consult  him  touching  in- 
tended pilgrimages,  but  shortly  gave  it  up, 
finding  that'  our  provincial  plans  generally 
fell  cold  upon  him.  He  was  almost  amused, 
one  day,  at  our  desire  to  ascertain  the 


184  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

whereabouts  of  that  insignificant  house  in 
Cheapside  —  it  is  No.  17,  if  I  remember  — 
in  which  Keats  wrote  his  sonnet  on  Chap- 
man's Homer.  Our  New  World  curiosity 
as  to  certain  localities  which  possess  no  in- 
terest whatever  to  the  Londoner  must  often 
have  struck  Smith  as  puerile.  His  protest 
or  his  disapproval  —  I  do  not  know  how  to 
name  it  —  was  always  so  evanescent  and 
shadowy  that  he  cannot  be  said  to  have  ex- 
pressed it ;  it  was  something  in  his  man- 
ner, and  not  in  his  words,  —  something  as 
vague  as  a  fleeting  breath  on  a  window- 
glass ;  but  it  dampened  us. 

There  is  a  singular  puissance  in  a  grave, 
chilling  demeanor,  though  it  may  be  backed 
by  no  solid  quality  whatever.  Nothing  so 
imposes  on  the  world.  I  have  known  per- 
sons to  attain  very  high  social  and  pub- 
lic distinction  by  no  other  means  than  a 
guarded  solemnity  of  manner.  Even  when 
we  see  through  its  shallowness,  we  are  still 
impressed  by  it,  just  as  children  are  para- 


SMITH.  185 

lyzed  by  a  sheeted  comrade,  though  they 
know  all  the  while  it  is  only  one  of  them- 
selves playing  ghost. 

I  suppose  it  was  in  the  course  of  nature 
that  we  should  have  fallen  under  the  dom- 
ination of  Smith,  and  have  come  to  accept 
him  with  a  degree  of  seriousness  which 
seems  rather  abject  to  me  in  retrospect. 
Without  acknowledging  it  to  ourselves,  we 
were  affected  by  his  intangible  criticism. 
I  would  not  have  had  it  come  to  his  ears 
for  a  five-pound  note  that  I  had  a  habit  of 
eating  a  chop  in  a  certain  snuffy  old  coffee- 
house near  Temple  Bar,  whenever  lunch- 
time  chanced  to  catch  me  in  that  vicinity. 

"O  plump  head-waiter  at  The  Cock," 

to  which  I  most  resorted,  I  should  have 
been  ashamed  to  have  Smith  know  that  I 
had  the  slightest  acquaintance  with  you, 
though  Tennyson  himself  has  sung  your 
praises  !  Nor  would  I  have  had  Smith  get 
wind  of  the  low-bred  excursion  I  made,  one 
day,  up  the  Thames,  in  a  squalid  steamer 


186  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

crowded  with  grimy  workingmen  and  their 
frouzy  wives  and  their  children.  I  hid  in 
my  heart  the  guilty  joy  I  took  in  two  dam- 
aged musicians  aboard  —  a  violin  and  a 
flageolet.  The  flageolet  —  I  am  speaking 
of  the  performer  —  had  such  a  delightfully 
disreputable  patch  over  his  right  eye  !  By 
the  way,  I  wonder  why  it  is  that  vagrant 
players  of  wind-instruments  in  England  us- 
ually have  a  patch  over  one  eye.  Are  they 
combative  as  a  class,  or  is  it  that  they  now 
and  then  blow  out  a  visual  organ  with  too 
assiduous  practice  in  early  youth?  The 
violin-man,  on  the  other  hand  —  perhaps  I 
ought  to  say  on  the  other  leg  —  was  lame. 
Altogether  the  pair  looked  like  the  remains 
of  a  band  that  had  been  blown  up  by  a 
steam-boiler  explosion  on  some  previous 
trip  on  the  river.  They  played  a  very  dole- 
ful tune  ;  full  of  unaccountable  gruffnesses 
and  shrillnesses,  which  it  was  my  mood  to 
accept  as  the  ghostly  replication  of  the 
cries  and  complaints  of  their  late  comrades 


SMITH.  187 

on  the  occasion  suggested.  There  was  a 
rough  crowd  on  board,  with  a  sprinkling  of 
small  shop-keepers,  and  here  and  there  a 
group  of  gaudily-dressed  young  women,  not 
to  be  set  down  in  the  category  of  doubtful 
characters.  These  people  were  off  on  a  hol- 
iday, and  it  was  curious  to  observe  the 
heavy,  brutal  way  they  took  their  pleasure, 
turning  it  into  a  hardship.  I  got  a  near 
view  of  a  phase  of  English  life  not  to  be 
met  with  in  the  rarefied  atmosphere  of 

D Street,  and  I  regret  to  admit  that  I 

have  many  a  time  enjoyed  myself  less  in 
better  company.  When  I  returned  to  the 
hotel  that  night,  Smith  stood  rebukefully 
drying  The  Pall  Mall  Gazette  for  me  be- 
fore the  parlor  fire. 

A  year  or  two  of  Smith  would  make  it 
difficult  for  a  man  to  dispense  with  him. 
With  Smith  for  a  valet,  one  would  have  no 
distinct  wants  to  perplex  one,  for  Smith's 
intuition  would  head  them  off  and  supply 
them  before  they  were  formulated.  He 


188     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

was,  as  I  have  more  than  hinted,  an  inval- 
uable servant.  Sometimes,  as  I  have  looked 
at  him,  and  reflected  on  his  unmurmuring 
acceptance  of  a  life  of  servitude,  and  the 
kind  of  sober  grace  he  threw  about  its  in- 
dignity, I  used  to  call  to  mind  that  disgrun- 
tled, truculent  waiter  described  by  John 
Hay  in  his  charming  Castilian  Days.  "  I 
know  a  gentleman  in  the  West,"  says  Mr. 
Hay,  "  whose  circumstances  had  forced  him 
to  become  a  waiter  in  a  backwoods  restau- 
rant. He  bore  a  deadly  grudge  at  the  pro- 
fession that  kept  him  from  starving,  and 
asserted  his  unconquered  nobility  of  soul  by 
scowling  at  his  customers  and  swearing  at 
the  viands  he  dispensed.  I  remember  the 
deep  sense  of  wrong  with  which  he  would 
growl,  '  Two  buckwheats,  be  gawd  ! ' 

As  to  Smith's  chronic  gloom,  it  really 
had  nothing  of  moroseness  in  it  —  only  an 
habitual  melancholy,  a  crystallized  patience. 
We  doubtless  put  it  to  some  crucial  tests 
with  our  American  ideas  and  idioms.  The 


SMITH.  189 

earlier  part  of  our  acquaintanceship  was 
fraught  with  mutual  perplexities.  It  was 
the  longest  time  before  we  discovered  that 
ay  ill  meant  Hay  Hill  Street,  Smith  mak- 
ing a  single  mouthful  of  it,  thus  —  ay  ill. 
One  morning  he  staggered  us  by  asking  if 
we  would  like  "  a  hapricot  freeze  "  for  des- 
sert. We  assented,  and  would  have  as- 
sented if  he  had  proposed  iced  hippopota- 
mus ;  but  the  nature  of  the  dish  was  a  mys- 
tery to  us,  and  perhaps  never,  since  the 
world  took  shape  out  of  chaos,  was  there 
a  simple  mould  of  apricot  jelly  looked  for- 
ward to  in  such  poignant  suspense.  It  is 
scarcely  permissible  in  so  light  a  sketch  as 
this  to  touch  on  anything  so  heavy  as  phi- 
lology ;  but  I  cannot  forbear  wondering 
what  malign  spirit  has  bewitched  the  vow- 
els of  the  lower-class  Englishman.  When 
he  finds  it  impossible  to  elide  the  vowel  at 
the  beginning  of  a  word,  he  invariably  cov- 
ers it  with  an  h  —  the  very  letter  that 
plays  the  deuce  with  him  under  ordinary 


190  FROM  PONKAPOG    TO  PESTH. 

circumstances.  An  Oxford  scholar  once  in- 
formed me  that  this  peculiarity  was  the  re- 
sult of  imperfect  education,  and  left  me  to 
settle  it  for  myself  why  the  peculiarity  was 
confined  to  England.  Illiterate  Americans 
—  if  there  are  any  —  do  not  drop  their  A's. 
But  as  I  have  said,  this  is  too  heavy  a  text. 
It  seems  almost  an  Irish  bull  to  say  that 
one  can  be  in  London  only  once  for  the  first 
time.  In  other  places  you  may  renew  first 
impressions.  A  city  on  the  Continent  al- 
ways remains  a  foreign  city  to  you,  no  mat- 
ter how  often  you  visit  it;  but  that  first 
time  in  London  is  an  experience  which  can 
never  be  made  to  repeat  itself.  Whatever 
is  alien  to  you  fades  away  under  your  earli- 
est glances ;  the  place  suddenly  takes  home- 
like aspects  ;  certain  streets  and  courts 
where  you  never  set  foot  before  strike  you 
familiarly.  It  is  a  place  where  you  might 
have  lived  —  this  great  seething  metropo- 
lis —  where  perhaps  you  once  did  live,  in 
hose  and  doublet  or  knightly  harness,  in 


SMITH.  191 

some  immemorial  century.  I  doubt  if  an 
American  ever  visited  England  without  feel- 
ing in  his  bosom  the  vibration,  more  or  less 
distinct,  of  these  invisible  threads  of  at- 
tachment. Everywhere  in  the  lucid  prose 
of  Hawthorne's  English  Note-Books  and 
Our  Old  Home  this  sentiment  lies  imbed- 
ded, like  a  spray  of  fossilized  fern. 

The  architecture,  the  language,  and  the 
customs  are  yours,  or  must  have  been  yours 
long  ago.  Smith  himself  dawns  upon  you 
as  a  former  acquaintance.  Possibly  he  was 
one  of  your  retainers  in  the  time  of  Henry 
VIII.  (You  like  to  picture  yourself  with 
retainers;  for  to  be  an  Englishman,  and 
not  a  duke  or  an  earl,  is  to  miss  four 
fifths  of  the  good  luck.)  Your  imagination 
gives  you  a  long  lease  of  existence  when 
you  fall  into  reveries  of  this  nature  ;  you 
fancy  yourself  extant  at  various  interesting 
periods  of  English  history ;  it  costs  you  no 
effort,  while  you  are  about  it,  to  have  a 
hand  in  a  dozen  different  reigns.  What  a 


192    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

picturesque,  highly  decorative,  household- 
art  sort  of  life  you  may  lead  from  the  era 
of  the  Black  Prince  down  to  the  Victorian 
age  !  How  lightly  you  assume  the  respon- 
sibility of  prolonging  Smith  through  all 
this  !  He  holds  the  bridle  of  an  extra 
horse  for  you  at  Poitiers,  and  also  at  that 
other  bloody  field  of  Agincourt ;  and  then, 
somewhat  later,  sits  on  the  box  of  your 
glass  coach  (which  Mr.  Samuel  Pepys,  sur- 
veying it  from  his  chamber  window,  pro- 
nounces "  mightily  fine ")  as  you  drive 
through  the  shrewish  winter  morning  to 
the  Palace  of  Whitehall  to  witness  the  re- 
moval of  Charles  the  First's  head. 

It  is  easy  to  shape  any  kind  of  chimera 
out  of  that  yellowish  London  fog.  Imme- 
diately after  this  epoch,  however,  your  im- 
pressions of  having  been  personally  asso- 
ciated with  the  events  of  English  history 
become  dimmer,  if  not  altogether  confused ; 
possibly  your  spirit  was  about  that  time 
undergoing  certain  organic  changes,  neces- 


SMITH.  193 

sary  to   the   metempsychosis   which   befel 
you  later. 

You  break  from  your  abstraction  to  the 
"consciousness  that  you  are  a  stranger  in 
your  native  land.  The  genius  loci  does  not 
recognize  you ;  you  are  an  altered  man. 
You  are  an  American.  Yet  a  little  while 
ago  the  past  of  England  was  as  much  your 
past  as  it  is  Smith's,  or  that  of  any  Briton 
of  them  all.  But  you  have  altered,  and 
forfeited  it.  Smith  has  not  altered  :  he  is 
the  same  tall,  efficient  serving-man  he  was 
in  the  time  of  the  Plantagenets.  He  has 
that  air  of  having  been  carefully  handed 
down  which  stamps  so  many  things  in 
England.  (If  this  has  been  said  before,  I 
beg  somebody's  pardon ;  I  am  treading  on 
much-walked-over  ground.)  There,  indeed, 
Nature  seems  careful  of  the  type.  The 
wretched  woman  who  murders  Kathleen 
Mavourneen  in  the  street  under  your  win- 
dow shares  this  quality  of  permanency  with 
Smith.  She,  or  one  precisely  like  her,  has 

13 


194  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

been  singing  ballads  for  ages,  and  will  go 
on  doing  it.  Endless  generations  of  Amer- 
ican tourists,  lodging  temporarily  at  Jones's 
perpetual  Hotel,  will  give  her  inexhausti- 
ble shillings,  and  Smith  will  carry  them 
out  to  her  on  his  indestructible  waiter. 
The  individual  Smith  may  occasionally  die, 
but  not  the  type,  not  the  essence.  My 
mind  can  take  in  Macaulay's  picture  of  the 
New  Zealander  sitting  on  a  broken  buttress 
of  London  Bridge,  and  cynically  contem- 
plating the  debris  —  "a  landscape  with  fig- 
ure," as  the  catalogues  would  put  it  —  but 
I  am  unable  to  grasp  the  idea  of  the  anni- 
hilation of  anything  so  firmly  established 
by  precedent  as  Smith.  I  fancy  that  even 
out  of  the  splintered  masonry  his  respect- 
ful, well-modulated  chest  voice  would  be 
heard  saying  (through  sheer  force  of  habit), 
"  Will  you  'ave  a  look  at  the  hevening  pa- 
per, sir  ?  "  or,  "  If  you  please,  sir,  the  'an- 
som  is  at  the  door  !  " 


VIII. 
A  DAY  IN  AFRICA. 


vm. 

A  DAY  IN  AFKICA. 
I. 

I  AM  not  immodest  enough  to  assume  to 
speak  for  other  readers,  but  for  my  own 
part  I  have  become  rather  tired  of  African 
travellers.  One  always  knows  beforehand 
what  they  have  in  their  pack,  and  pre- 
cisely the  way  in  which  they  will  spread 
out  their  wares.  The  victorious  struggle 
with  the  lion  and  the  hairbreadth  escape 
from  death  at  the  hands  of  the  native  chiefs 
are  matters  easily  anticipated ;  and  that  ro- 
mantic young  savage  who  attaches  himself 
body  and  soul  to  the  person  of  the  adven- 
turer, and  invariably  returns  with  him  to 
civilization  —  what  a  threadbare  figure  that 
is !  How  well  we  know  him  under  his 


198    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

various  guttural  aliases !  Yet  what  would 
six  months  in  Africa  amount  to  without 
this  lineal  descendant  of  Robinson  Crusoe's 
man  Friday  ? 

I  may  seem  to  display  a  want  of  tact  in 
disparaging  African  travellers,  being,  in  a 
humble  fashion,  an  African  traveller  my- 
self, but  I  have  a  rare  advantage  over 
everybody  who  has  ever  visited  that  coun- 
try, and  written  about  it  —  I  remained 
there  only  one  day.  The  standpoint  from 
which  I  view  the  Dark  Continent  is  thus 
unique.  If  I  had  remained  a  year,  or  even 
a  fortnight,  I  should  have  ceased  to  be 
original.  I  should  naturally  have  killed 
my  lion,  tempted  the  appetite  of  the  an- 
thropophagite, and  brought  home  a  little 
negro  boy.  I  did  none  of  these  things,  and 
instead  of  obscurely  falling  in  at  the  tail 
end  of  a  long  line  of  African  explorers,  I 
claim  to  stand  quite  alone,  and  in  an  atti- 
tude so  wholly  unconventional  as  to  entitle 
it  to  copyright.  So  far  as  I  am  aware,  the 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  199 

idea  never  before  entered  the  head  of  any 
man  to  travel  five  thousand  miles  to  Africa, 
and  then  to  stay  there  only  twenty-four 
hours  ! 

I  must  admit,  however,  that  this  idea  did 
not  take  quite  that  definite  form  in  my 
mind  in  the  first  instance.  A  visit  to  Tan- 
gier was  not  down  in  my  itinerary  at  all, 
but  on  reaching  Gibraltar,  after  prolonged 
wandering  through  the  interior  of  Spain, 
Africa  threw  itself  in  my  way,  so  to  speak. 
There,  just  across  the  narrow  straits,  lay 
the  tawny  barbaric  shore.  Standing  at  an 
embrasure  of  one  of  those  marvellous  sub- 
terranean batteries  which  render  Gibraltar 
impregnable  —  long  galleries  tunnelled  in 
the  solid  rock,  and  winding  up  to  the  very 
summit  of  the  vast  pile  —  I  almost  fancied 
I  could  make  out  the  lion-colored  line  of 
the  Barbary  coast.  A  magical  sea-haze 
that  morning,  together  with  a  strip  of  dun 
cloud  lying  low  against  the  horizon,  encour- 
aged the  illusion.  It  was  purely  an  illu- 


200    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

sion,  for  it  is  three  good  hours  and  a  half 
by  steamer  from  the  boat-landing  at  the 
foot  of  Waterport  Street  to  the  dismantled, 
God-forsaken  mole  at  Tangier- 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  201 


n. 

I  DO  not  believe  there  is  a  dirtier  little 
steamer  in  the  world  than  the  one  that 
plies  between  Gibraltar  and  Morocco,  and 
I  am  positive  that  since  Noah's  ark  no  ves- 
sel ever  put  to  sea  with  a  more  variegated 
and  incongruous  lot  of  passengers  than  sa- 
luted my  eyes  as  I  stepped  on  board  the 
Jackal  one  April  afternoon.  The  instant 
I  set  foot  on  deck  I  had  passed  out  of  Eu- 
rope. Here  were  the  squalor  and  the  glit- 
ter of  the  Orient  —  the  solemn  dusky  faces 
that  look  out  on  the  reader  from  the  pages 
of  the  Arabian  Nights,  and  the  thousand 
and  one  disagreeable  odors  of  which  that 
fascinating  chronicle  makes  no  mention. 
Such  a  chattering  in  Spanish,  Portuguese, 
Hebrew,  and  Arabic  !  Such  queer  brown- 
legged  figures  in  pointed  hoods  and  yellow 
slippers  !  Though  there  were  first  and  sec- 


202     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ond  class  fares,  there  appeared  to  be  no  dis- 
tinction in  the  matter  of  accommodation. 
From  stem  to  stern  the  long  narrow  deck 
was  crowded  with  Moors,  Arabs,  negroes, 
Jews,  and  half-breeds,  inextricably  mixing 
themselves  up  with  empty  fruit  crates, 
bamboo  baskets,  and  bales  of  merchandise. 
I  speculated  as  to  what  would  become  of 
all  that  loose  luggage  if  we  were  to  encoun- 
ter a  blow  outside ;  for  this  placid-looking 
summer  sea  has  a  way  of  lashing  itself  into 
an  ungovernable  rage  without  any  percepti- 
ble provocation.  In  case  of  wet  weather 
there  was  no  shelter  except  a  stifling  cabin 
between-decks,  where  the  thirsty  were 
waited  upon  by  a  fez-crowned  man  carved 
out  of  ebony,  who  dispensed  a  thin  sour 
wine  from  a  goat-skin,  which  he  carried  un- 
der his  arm  like  a  bagpipe.  Not  liking  the 
look  of  the  water  tank  'midships,  I  tested 
this  wine  early  in  the  voyage,  and  came  to 
the  conclusion  that  death  by  thirst  was  not 
without  its  advantages. 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  203 

The  steamer  had  slipped  her  moorings 
and  was  gliding  out  of  the  bay  before  I  no- 
ticed the  movement,  so  absorbed  had  I  been 
in  studying  the  costumes  and  manners  of 
my  fellow-voyagers.  What  a  gayly  colored, 
shabby,  picturesque  crowd !  It  was  as  if 
some  mad  masquerade  party  had  burst  the 
bounds  of  a  ball-room  and  run  away  to  sea. 
Here  was  a  Tangier  merchant  in  sky-blue 
gaberdine,  with  a  Persian  shawl  twisted 
around  his  waist,  and  a  black  velvet  cap 
set  on  the  back  of  his  head ;  there  a  Moor, 
in  snowy  turban  and  fleecy  caftan,  with  a 
jewel-hilted,  crescent-bladed  knife  at  his 
girdle.  Tall  slim  Arabs,  in  dingy  white 
robes  like  those  worn  by  Dominicans, 
stalked  up  and  down  between  the  heaps  of 
luggage,  or  leaned  over  the  taffrail  in  the 
pitiless  sunshine,  gazing  listlessly  into  the 
distance.  Others  stowed  themselves  among 
the  freight,  and  went  to  sleep.  If  you 
seated  yourself  by  chance  on  what  appeared 
to  be  a  bit  of  old  sail,  something  stirred 


204    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

protestingly  under  you,  and  a  bronze  vis- 
age slowly  unshelled  itself  from  the  hood 
of  a  burnoose.  Everywhere  was  some 
strange  shape.  In  the  bow  of  the  vessel  a 
fat  negro  from  the  Soudan  sat  cross-legged, 
counting  his  money,  which  he  arranged  in 
piles  on  a  rug  in  front  of  him,  the  silver  on 
one  side  and  the  copper  on  the  other.  He 
looked  like  a  Hindoo  idol,  with  his  heavy- 
lidded  orbs  and  baggy  cheeks,  the  latter 
sagging  almost  down  to  the  folds  of  flesh 
that  marked  his  triple  chin,  those  rings  of 
the  human  oak.  Near  him,  but  not  watch- 
ing him,  and  evidently  not  caring  for  any- 
thing, stood  a  bareheaded,  emaciated  old 
man.  His  cranium,  as  polished  and  yellow 
as  ancient  ivory,  was  covered  with  a  deli- 
cate tracery  of  blue  veins,  and  resembled  a 
geographical  globe.  At  his  girdle  hung  a 
leather  pouch,  apparently  containing  a  few 
coins.  Both  this  person  and  the  negro,  as 
well  as  the  majority  of  their  companions, 
were  returning  from  a  commercial  visit  to 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  205 

Gibraltar.  The  chief  trade  of  Tangier  and 
the  outlying  districts  consists  in  supplying 
the  English  garrison  and  the  cities  of  Cadiz 
and  Lisbon  with  cattle,  fowls,  fruits,  and 
green  stuff.  I  saw  none  of  these  people  on 
the  streets  of  Gibraltar,  however.  They 
probably  hugged  the  water-front,  where  the 
markets  are,  and  did  not  venture  into  the 
upper  town.  With  their  graceful  dress 
they  would  not  have  been  out  of  place 
among  the  Highland  kilts  and  scarlet  coats 
that  light  up  the  alameda  of  a  pleasant 
afternoon. 

Already  the  huge  rock  of  Gibraltar, 
which  is  looked  upon  with  such  envious 
and  hopeless  eyes  by  the  Spaniards,  had 
shrunk  to  half  its  proportions.  It  lay 
there,  gray,  grim,  and  fantastic,  like  some 
necromancer's  castle  on  the  edge  of  the  sea. 
Before  us  was  nothing  but  twinkling  sun- 
shine and  salt-water.  At  our  right  were 
vague  purple  peaks  and  capes,  beyond  the 
point  of  one  of  which  stood  the  Trafalgar 


206     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

light-house,  invisible  to  us ;  but  who  can 
pass  within  twenty  leagues  of  it  and  not 
think  of  England's  great  admiral?  The 
sea  was  crisped  by  a  refreshing  westerly 
breeze ;  over  us  the  sky  sprung  its  pale 
cerulean  arch,  festooned  here  and  there 
with  shapeless  silvery  clouds  like  cobwebs. 
Fitful  odors  blown  from  unseen  groves  of 
palm  and  orange  sweetened  the  air. 

"  0  happy  ship, 

To  rise  and  dip, 
With  the  blue  crystal  at  your  lip ! " 

The  heat  of  the  sun  was  no  longer  intoler- 
able. The  man  at  the  wheel  had  thrown 
back  his  capote,  and  was  smoking  a  cigar- 
ette. The  noisy  group  of  Arabs  huddled 
together  round  the  capstan  had  ceased  their 
chatter.  The  fat  negro,  his  pitiful  coins 
counted  and  laid  away,  was  leaning  his 
head  against  a  coil  of  rope,  and  staring 
with  glazed  eyeballs  at  nothing.  A  hush, 
a  calm,  that  was  not  lethargy  —  for  it  par- 
took of  the  nature  of  a  dream  —  seemed  to 
have  fallen  upon  all. 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  207 

There  were  several  Europeans  aboard 
besides  myself,  if  I  may  pass  for  a  Euro- 
pean—  a  Marseillaise  gentleman  about  to 
join  his  wife,  the  guest  of  her  brother,  the 
French  consul  at  Tangier  ;  an  Italian  gen- 
tleman travelling  for  pleasure  (not  that  the 
other  was  not)  ;  a  Dutch  painter  from 
Antwerp,  with  an  amazing  porcelain  pipe  ; 
and  last,  but  not  least,  a  Briton,  among 
whose  luggage  was  a  circular  tin  bath-tub, 
concerning  which  the  Mohammedan  mind 
had  swamped  itself  in  vain  conjecture. 
Was  it  a  piece  of  defensive  armor  —  a 
shield,  for  example  —  or  was  it  a  gigantic 
frying-pan?  These  Christian  dogs,  they 
have  such  outlandish  fashions !  No  Arab 
passed  it  without  a  curious  glance,  and  at 
intervals  quite  a  little  crowd  would  gather 
about  it.  Now  and  then  a  Jew,  who  knew 
what  the  article  was,  though  he  had  never 
used  it,  smiled  superciliously. 

We  had  been  under  way  an  hour  or 
more,  when  I  observed  the  Englishman  in 


208     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

deep  converse  with  a  personage  who  had 
greatly  impressed  me  as  I  caught  a  glimpse 
of  him  on  the  gangway  at  Gibraltar  before 
the  boat  started.  I  had  lost  him  a  moment 
afterward,  and  reluctantly  concluded  that 
he  had  gone  ashore  again.  But  there  he 
was,  wherever  he  came  from.  By  the  gra- 
cious dignity  of  his  manner  and  the  rich- 
ness of  his  dress,  he  might  have  been  Ha- 
roun-al-Raschid  himself.  He  was  Moorish, 
but  clearly  of  finer  material  than  the  rest. 
His  burnoose,  of  some  soft  indigo  stuff,  was 
edged  with  gold,  liquid  threads  of  which 
also  ran  through  the  gossamer  caic  bound 
about  his  turban.  The  two  ends  of  this 
scarf  flowed  over  his  shoulders,  and  crossed 
themselves  on  his  breast,  forming  an  effec- 
tive frame  for  his  handsome  features.  His 
legs  were  bare,  but  the  half-slippers  cover- 
ing his  feet  were  of  costly  make.  If  he 
was  not  a  person  of  consequence,  he  looked 
it.  I  was  wondering  whether  he  was  a 
cadi  or  a  pasha,  and  what  he  was  doing 
without  attendants,  when  he  quitted  the 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  209 

Englishman  and  went  to  the  water-tank, 
where  the  loungers  respectfully  made  room 
for  him.  He  then  performed  an  act  which 
suggested  unutterable  things  touching  that 
water  tank.  Instead  of  helping  himself 
brutally,  as  the  others  had  done,  he  grace- 
fully covered  his  mouth  with  one  of  the 
ends  of  his  caic,  and  drank  through  that. 
I  had  been  drinking  this  water  unfiltered, 
making  an  aquarium  of  myself. 

A  few  minutes  later  I  was  surprised  to 
see  the  man  approaching  the  rear  deck, 
where  I  occupied  a  camp-stool,  captured 
and  retained  after  unheard-of  struggles.  It 
was  plainly  his  intention  to  address  me.  I 
rose  from  my  seat  to  receive  the  card  which 
he  held  out  politely.  I  here  print  it  in 
full,  for  the  benefit  of  future  explorers,  to 
whom  I  heartily  commend  the  Hadji  Cad- 
dor  Sahta,1  dragoman,  king's  courier,  and 
gentleman  at  large : 

1  The  title  of  Hadji  indicates  that  the  bearer  has  made  the 
pilgrimage  to  Mecca. 
14 


210          FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 
HADJI  CADDOR   SAHTA. 


GUIDE  AND  INTERPRETER. 
Fully  conversant  with  the  French,  English,  Italian,  Spanish, 

and  Arabic  languages. 
Is  likewise  disposed  to  accompany  travellers  to  the  interior 

of 

MOROCCO. 
FULLY  SECURITY  OFFERED. 


TANGIER. 

The  Hadji  Caddor  —  who  was  better 
than  his  prospectus,  for  he  spoke  unexcep- 
tionable English  —  was  organizing  a  party 
to  visit  the  ancient  city  of  Fez,  and  begged 
the  honor  of  my  company. 

"  The  senor  doubtless  knows,"  he  said, 
"  that  a  caravan  leaves  for  Fez  in  the 
course  of  a  few  days.  But  to  travel  with 
a  caravan  is  to  travel  with  cattle.  It  is  not 
so  with  me ;  we  have  our  own  tents  and 
slaves  and  armed  escort,  and  go  as  gentle- 
men and  princes,  thanks  be  to  God  and  my 
personal  supervision !  " 

I  explained  to  the  Hadji  that  my  modest 
purpose  was  simply  to  spend  a  day  in 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  211 

Africa,  and  that  Tangier  was  the  limit  of 
my  desire.  Upon  this  he  remarked  that 
his  preparations  would  detain  him  in  the 
town  until  the  end  of  the  week,  and  that 
he  laid  his  services  at  my  feet.  I  metaphor- 
ically picked  them  up  on  the  spot,  and  en- 
gaged him  to  show  me  the  sights  in  Tangier. 

While  this  brief  dialogue  was  passing, 
an  ill-begotten  Moor  in  a  dirty  turban  made 
off  with  my  camp-stool.  He  was  sitting 
upon  it  stolidly  a  few  paces  distant.  I  ad- 
vanced a  step  to  assert  my  claims,  when  the 
Hadji  checked  me. 

"  It  is  useless,"  he  said,  laying  one  finger 
softly  on  the  back  of  my  hand.  "  He  's  a 
bad  man  —  Ayoub,  the  tailor.  I  know  him. 
Leave  him  alone.  Our  Spanish  friends 
have  a  good  proverb,  '  It  is  a  waste  of  lath- 
er to  shave  an  ass.'  I  will  get  you  another 
seat,  senor." 

The  Hadji  Caddor  was  a  philosopher ; 
but,  like  a  great  many  philosophers,  he  was 
philosophical  chiefly  for  other  people.  If 


212          FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

the  case  had  been  his,  I  am  sure  he  would 
not  have  borne  it  patiently.  After  all,  one 
can  not  ask  more  of  a  stoic  than  not  to  cry 
out  at  another  man's  toothache.  The  Hadji 
was  really  a  character,  and  if  I  were  paint- 
ing a  figure-piece  instead  of  a  landscape,  I 
would  draw  him  life-size.  He  had  travelled 
far  and  wide,  even  to  the  steppes  of  Tarta- 
ry.  He  spoke  several  Continental  tongues 
with  singular  fluency ;  Arabic  and  half  a 
dozen  polyglot  dialects  were,  of  course,  his 
by  nature.  He  was  very  wise,  and,  as  the 
Orientals  have  it,  he  had  plucked  his  wis- 
dom from  the  stem  of  experience.  I  never 
met  a  more  intelligent  man,  black  or  white. 
His  remarks  had  often  a  pith  of  great  orig- 
inality, as  when,  for  instance,  in  describing 
a  certain  Jew  of  Algesiras,  who  had  played 
him  a  scurvy  trick,  he  observed,  "But  he  's 
nothing,  sefior,  less  than  nothing  —  a  ci- 
pher with  the  rim  removed  !  " 

We   fell  to  talking  on  the  condition  of 
Morocco.     Was  the  young  Sultan,  Muley 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  213 

el  Hassen,  popular?  Though  the  Hadji 
was  somewhat  guarded  in  his  comments  on 
the  imperial  government,  he  gave  me  a 
clear  idea  of  the  degradation  and  wretched- 
ness of  the  people.  The  territory  known  as 
Morocco  is  inclosed  by  the  Mediterranean, 
Algeria,  the  desert  of  Sahara,  and  the  At- 
lantic, and  is  inhabited  by  a  mongrel  popu- 
lation of  about  800,000  souls.  The  agri- 
culturists are  mostly  Arabs  and  Shelloohs, 
dwelling  on  the  rich  plains ;  they  are  poor 
cultivators,  and  are  taxed  to  death.  The 
wild  Berber  tribes,  in  a  chronic  state  of  re- 
volt, occupy  the  perilous  heights  and  passes 
of  the  Atlas  chain.  The  Moors,  the  Jews, 
and  the  blacks  crowd  themselves  into  the 
towns  and  villages.  From  the  blacks  the 
bulk  of  the  emperor's  army  is  recruited. 
The  Moors,  descended  principally  from  the 
Moors  driven  out  of  Spain  by  Ferdinand 
and  Isabella,  are  a  degenerate  race,  contam- 
inated by  intermarriages  with  the  Arabs. 
The  Jews  are  precisely  what  they  were  in 


214     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

Europe  in  the  Middle  Ages  —  thrifty,  craf- 
ty, persecuted,  uncomplaining,  taking  it  out 
of  their  oppressors  in  the  way  of  profits ; 
neither  their  lot  nor  their  nature  has  been 
changed  by  exile.  The  notable  towns  are 
Morocco,  the  capital,  El-Araish,  Tafilet, 
Agadir,  Mogadore,  Fez,  and  Tangier.  They 
are  all  ground  into  dust  under  the  heel  of 
the  emperor.  Tangier,  the  outer  breached 
wall  of  Islamism,  is  regarded  with  particu- 
lar disfavor,  her  commerce  harassed  and 
her  trade  strangled  by  whimsical  restric- 
tions. No  man  there  dares  own  himself 
rich  ;  if  suspected  of  secreted  wealth,  he  is 
tortured  until  he  reveals  the  hiding-place  ; 
then  both  his  head  and  his  money  are  re- 
moved. The  emperor's  idea  of  taxation  is 
the  simplest  possible:  he  takes  what  he 
wants.  There  is  no  appeal.  He  alters 
weights,  measures,  and  prices  at  will ;  the 
multiplication  table  goes  down  before  him. 
The  sword,  the  cord,  the  bastinado,  and  the 
branding-iron  are  ever  ready  to  enforce  his 


A  DAT  JN  AFRICA.  215 

caprice.  It  is  no  hyperbole  when  the  court 
poet  assures  this  monster  that  he  holds  life 
and  death  in  the  hollow  of  his  hand.  He  is 
the  only  full-blown  despot  whose  dominions 
lie  contiguous  to  civilization.  The  Czar  of 
all  the  Russias  is  not  so  much  his  own  mas- 
ter ;  the  Sultan  at  Constantinople  is  not  so 
absolute.  The  great  despot  breeds  a  host 
of  lesser  ones,  and  it  is  these  that  bleed 
Morocco  unmercifully.  The  nomadic  tribes 
have  their  sheik,  the  cities  their  cadi,  the 
provinces  their  pasha  —  and  the  head  devil 
at  Fez  has  them  all.  "  But  there  is  no 
God  but  God,"  said  the  Hadji  Caddor,  re- 
signedly. 

Just  then  there  was  a  hubbub  in  the  for- 
ward part  of  the  ship.  Three  or  four  mu- 
latto sailors  were  dragging  a  slightly  built 
young  man  aft,  and  the  slightly  built  young 
man  was  stoutly  resisting.  I  forgot  to  state 
that  shortly  after  leaving  port  a  person  of 
insinuating  amiability  and  politeness  dis- 
tributed himself  among  the  passengers  and 


216  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

collected  their  tickets.  It  now  appeared 
that  this  person  was  merely  an  intoxicated 
passenger,  with  no  authority  whatever  to 
act  in  the  matter,  and  they  were  dragging 
him  before  the  captain.  This  episode  cre- 
ated great  merriment.  I  do  not  know  what 
became  of  the  amateur  ticket-gatherer  — 
he  was  a  born  humorist,  and  I  trust  no 
harm  befell  him  —  for  the  cry  of  "  Land  !  " 
lured  me  to  the  bows  of  the  vessel.  The 
chalky  fortress  and  town  of  Ceuta  —  the 
Spanish  convict  station  —  were  fading  out 
on  our  left.  Presently  we  rounded  Cape 
Malabar,  and,  yes,  there  was  Tangier  —  an 
indistinguishable  mass  of  white  that  mo- 
mentarily shaped  itself  into  crenellated  bat- 
tlements and  mosques  and  huddled  house- 
tops. 

As  we  dropped  anchor  within  gunshot  of 
the  white-walled  town,  it  lay  in  the  golden 
mist  of  the  approaching  sunset.  Here  and 
there  a  projecting  piece  of  snowy  stone- 
work took  a  transient  rosy  tinge,  and  here 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  217 

and  there  a  patch  of  black  shadow  etched 
itself  against  some  indentation.  At  one  or 
two  points  along  the  zigzag  wall  a  number 
of  heavy  cannon  thrust  their  noses  over  the 
parapet,  and  seemed  irresolutely  holding 
their  sullen  breath  as  they  stared  seaward. 
At  the  right,  the  flat-roofed  houses  stretched 
like  a  gigantic  marble  staircase  up  the  flank 
of  a  hill  crowned  with  a  citadel  (the  Kasba, 
or  castle)  that  commanded  the  whole  of  the 
lower  town,  the  most  prominent  feature  of 
which  was  a  slender  square  tower  set  with 
richly  glazed  tiles.  These  bits  of  porcelain 
sparkled  like  jewels  as  the  lingering  sun- 
light touched  them  one  by  one.  Behind  all 
this  rose  a  bleak,  arid  mountain,  draped 
now  in  delicate  violet  tints.  If  Tangier 
had  nothing  more  to  offer  than  that  exqui- 
site view  of  herself,  I  should  still  have  been 
paid  for  my  pilgrimage. 

Our  anchor  had  scarcely  taken  its  plunge 
when  a  fleet  of  barqmllos  put  out  from  a 
strip  of  beach  that  fringed  the  base  of  the 


218     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

sea-wall;  in  the  shelter  of  which  lay  several 
larger  craft  drying  their  canvas  after  yes- 
terday's rain.  I  was  noting  the  good  effect 
of  the  cinnamon-colored  lateen-sails  against 
the  dazzling  white  masonry,  when  the  small 
boats  came  dashing  alongside  like  pande- 
monium broken  loose.  Each  of  these  boats 
was  manned  by  two  or  three  vociferating, 
half-naked  maniacs,  who  stood  ready  to  dis- 
member a  passenger  rather  than  not  get 
him  at  all.  One  could  imagine  a  lot  of  Al- 
gerine  pirates  about  to  attack  a  helpless 
merchantman.  As  soon  as  the  quarantine 
officer  gave  the  signal  of  permission,  the 
yelling  horde  clambered  up  the  ship's  side 
and  sprang  among  their  victims.  It  would 
require  a  Dantean  pen  to  describe  the  tu- 
mult and  confusion  that  followed.  I  will 
only  state  that  I  and  my  impedimenta  — 
which  consisted  of  a  hand-bag  and  an  over- 
coat—  went  ashore  in  three  boats.  That 
the  whole  of  me  went  in  a  single  convey- 
ance was  owing  to  the  coolness  and  energy 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  219 

of  the  Hadji  Caddor,  who  made  his  way 
through  the  crowd  to  my  side  by  quietly 
and  systematically  strangling  everybody 
that  opposed  him. 

As  we  pushed  off  from  the  steamer,  the 
babel  of  voices  rose  higher  and  higher,  and 
above  it  all  I  caught  the  deep  ringing  into- 
nations of  the  Englishman  —  "  Come,  now, 
you  black  rascal,  you  cawn't  be  knocking 
that  tub  abaut,  don't  you  know  I "  My 
Arab  captor,  a  magnificent  animal,  with 
the  biceps  of  a  gladiator,  disdainfully  tossed 
his  head,  and  taking  a  long  oarsweep,  re- 
marked, "  Aha !  Mister  Goddam,  he  have 
plenty  trouble  with  him  dam  tub  !  " 

The  Hadji  smiled  gravely  on  the  young 
barbarian  airing  his  English. 

To  run  a  little  ahead  of  my  narrative,  a 
Moorish  armorer,  with  three  assistants,  was 
summoned  to  the  hotel  the  next  morning 
to  straighten  out  the  Briton's  bath-tub, 
which  had  been  bent  almost  double,  and 
otherwise  banged  beyond  recognition.  The 


220     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTU. 

rough,  boatmen  of  Malaga  and  Cadiz  are 
insipid  angels  compared  with  those  fellows 
at  Tangier. 

"  A  peseta  for  you  if  you  get  in  first !  " 
cried  the  Hadji. 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  221 


m. 

Two  other  boats  reached  the  landing 
simultaneously  with  our  own,  and  a  pair  of 
salaming  rascals,  who  appeared  to  consider 
me  as  deeply  in  their  debt  as  if  they  had 
saved  my  life,  approached  with  my  missing 
personal  effects.  The  Hadji  unceremoni- 
ously snatched  coat  and  bag  from  their 
hands,  and  led  the  way  up  to  the  city  gate, 
the  fellows  following  on,  gesticulating  and 
tearing  their  hair  in  despair.  We  were 
about  to  pass  under  a  massive  horseshoe 
archway,  when  the  great  cedar-wood  doors 
were  suddenly  closed  on  our  noses  —  a 
stratagem  of  the  guards  to  wrest  a  bribe 
from  the  unlucky  seafarer.  The  Hadji 
glanced  quickly  at  the  sun,  and  saw  that  it 
yet  lacked  a  few  minutes  of  the  lawful  hour 
for  closing  the  gates  ;  then,  receiving  no  re- 


222  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

sponse  to  his  summons,  he  picked  up  a  big 
fragment  of  rock,  and  began  to  hammer 
on  the  iron-damped  portals,  accompanying 
himself  with  some  very  vigorous  Arabic, 
which  my  ignorance  of  the  language  did 
not  prevent  me  from  recognizing  as  oaths 
of  the  first  magnitude.  After  considerable 
hesitation,  the  bolts  were  reluctantly  drawn, 
the  doors  thrown  open,  and  we  passed  in  on 
the  double-quick,  taking  our  way  through  a 
dismal  walled  alley  to  the  hotel.  I  call  it 
an  alley,  but  it  was,  in  fact,  the  principal 
street.  It  extended  from  the  sea-front  to 
the  gate  of  the  Soc-de-Barra,  or  outside 
market,  and  bisected  in  its  course  the  only 
public  square  in  Tangier.  I  learned  to 
know  the  street  very  well  afterward,  for  it 
was  the  street  of  the  bazars. 

The  exterior  architecture  and  the  inte- 
rior topography  of  the  hotel  to  which  the 
Hadji  shortly  conducted  me  rather  defy  de- 
scription. It  was  a  large  rambling  building, 
which  somehow  included  a  part  of  the  city 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  223 

fortifications.  You  stepped  directly  from 
the  cobble-stoned  footway  into  a  spacious 
chamber,  or  hall,  paved  with  blood-red  tiles 
in  the  Moorish  fashion  ;  variegated  tiles 
and  plaques  were  set  in  the  walls ;  a  lamp 
of  cut  brass  hung  from  the  ceiling ;  in  one 
corner  stood  three  or  four  slim-barrelled 
Moorish  rifles,  with  stocks  curiously  carved 
and  inlaid.  There  were  two  doors  hung 
with  bright  tapestry,  one  leading  into  a 
kitchen,  and  the  other  into  a  dining-hall. 
The  rez-de-chaussee  was  at  least  compre- 
hensible ;  the  rest  was  mystery.  I  do  not 
know  now  whether  the  sleeping  apartment 
assigned  me  was  on  the  second  or  the  fifth 
floor,  or  if  there  were  any  fifth  floor.  I 
mounted  a  steep  staircase,  traversed  several 
corridors,  descended  a  flight  of  stone  steps, 
and  found  myself  out-of-doors.  Passing 
along  a  rampart  originally  pierced  for  can- 
non, I  turned  two  or  three  sharp  angles, 
climbed  up  some  more  stone  steps,  and 
stood  in  a  square,  whitewashed  room.  From 


224    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  window  I  had  a  lovely  view  of  sea  and 
town,  and  close  by  the  minaret  of  the  Mo- 
hammedan mosque  lifted  itself  into  the 
warm  evening  sky.  At  a  small  opening 
high  up  in  the  minaret  the  muezzin,  with 
outspread  arms,  was  calling  the  faithful  to 
prayer,  and  casting  the  names  of  Allah  and 
Mohammed  to  the  four  points  of  the  com- 
pass. I  would  fain  have  lingered  a  while  to 
look  on  a  scene  which,  realizing  some  old 
and  half-forgotten  dreams  of  mine,  now 
seemed  itself  a  dream,  but  the  Hadji  was 
waiting  outside  on  the  battlements  to  pilot 
me  down  to  dinner. 

I  pass  over  the  tedious  ceremony  of  the 
table  d'hdte.  I  did  not  go  to  Tangier  to 
eat ;  and  perhaps  it  was  well  I  did  not,  for 
neither  the  favorite  national  dish  called  cfis- 
ctissfi  nor  the  small  coppery  oyster  that  has 
the  assurance  to  propagate  itself  on  this 
coast  was  much  to  my  taste.  The  guests 
at  table,  at  the  head  of  which  sat  the 
French  consul,  were  all  Europeans,  and  all 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  225 

in  evening  dress,  except  my  acquaintance 
the  Dutch  painter,  who  performed  miracles 
with  some  red  mullet.  After  dinner  I  be- 
took myself  to  the  hotel  entrance  to  finish 
a  cigarette.  Several  Moors,  muffled  in 
white  mantles,  and  carrying  long  guns, 
lounged  in  the  doorway.  Outside,  crouched 
on  the  cobble-stones,  were  three  musicians, 
with  theorbo,  mandolin,  and  triangle,  mak- 
ing music  like  that  of  the  piper  of  Bujal- 
ance,  who  charged  a  maravedi  for  playing, 
and  ten  for  leaving  off. 

The  Hadji  had  planned  to  take  me  to  an 
Arab  caf 6  —  not  the  cafe  in  the  square,  us- 
ually visited  by  strangers,  but  an  unadul- 
terated Arab  place  of  entertainment,  sel- 
dom profaned  by  the  presence  of  giaours. 
The  Antwerp  artist  and  the  Englishman 
were  to  accompany  us.  Just  as  the  edge 
of  a  new  moon  had  begun  to  cut  the  dark, 
the  Hadji  appeared  with  a  lantern  fastened 
to  the  end  of  a  staff,  and  we  sallied  forth. 

Save  for  this  lantern  and  that  moon  — 

15 


226     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PEBTH. 

which  did  not  seem  half  so  good  a  moon  as 
we  have  at  home  —  we  should  have  been  in 
Stygian  darkness  as  we  stumbled  along  the 
unlighted  streets.  On  either  hand  stretched 
a  high  wall,  pierced  at  intervals  with  a 
door  shaped  like  a  clover  leaf,  or  with  a 
barred  casement,  divided  in  the  centre  by  a 
slender  pillar,  like  the  windows  in  the  Al- 
cazar at  Seville.  There  were  few  persons 
stirring.  Now  and  then  a  sheeted  figure 
flitted  past  us  and  vanished  through  an 
inky  archway  —  possibly  some  belated  slave 
bearing  a  scented  missive  to  Fatima  or 
Noureddin.  Once  we  came  upon  a  tall 
Rifan,  with  the  red  cloth  case  of  his  gun- 
barrel  twisted  round  his  brows  for  a  tur- 
ban ;  and  once  the  Hadji's  lantern  lighted 
up  the  fierce  outlines  of  a  man  with  a  na- 
ked scymetar  in  his  hand  pursuing  some 
one  in  the  distance.  Now  and  then  a  fugi- 
tive perfume  told  us  we  were  near  a  gar- 
den, and  a  stiff  palm-tree  shot  up  from  be- 
hind a  wall,  and  nicked  the  blue-blackness 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  227 

of  the  sky.  On  we  pressed  through  the 
shadows,  ourselves  shadowy  and  spectral 
and  silent.  The  Hadji,  haughty  and  grave, 
with  his  scabbard  clinking  along  the  stones, 
seemed  like  the  caliph  in  the  old  story- 
book, and  we  his  attendants,  on  some  noc- 
turnal ramble  through  the  streets  of  Bag- 
dad.. 

Suddenly  our  guide  halted  at  a  low  mean 
door.  Above  it  was  a  dimly  lighted  lattice, 
from  which  came  a  murmuring,  melancholy 
sourid  of  voices,  accented  by  the  twanging 
of  guitar  strings.  The  flame  of  the  lantern 
showed  us  a  black  hand  painted  on  the 
masonry  at  the  left  of  the  entrance.  That 
hand  appears  at  the  door-side  of  many  of 
the  houses  in  Tangier,  and  is  a  charm  to 
keep  off  the  evil  spirits. 

Passing  up  a  flight  of  well-worn  stone 
steps,  we  entered  the  caf  6  —  a  long  narrow 
chamber,  divided  in  the  centre  by  the 
ever-recurring  horseshoe  arch.  The  white- 
washed walls  were  bare  of  ornament,  save 


228     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

a  scarlet  vine  running  round  the  room  just 
above  the  mopboard.  In  the  first  compart- 
ment a  negro  was  making  coffee  at  a  shelf 
suspended  from  the  ceiling.  In  the  other 
section  were  the  guests,  who  saluted  us 
with  various  kinds  of  stares  —  curious,  in- 
solent, or  indifferent,  as  the  mood  prompted 
—  after  which  they  ignored  our  presence  as 
effectively  as  a  group  of  ill-bred  Christians 
could  have  done.  Sharp-faced  Arab  youths 
and  full-bearded,  vicious-looking  old  men 
squatted  on  the  matting.  There  was  not  a 
piece  of  furniture  anywhere,  not  even  one 
of  those  dwarf  tables  frequently  to  be  seen 
in  Moorish  houses.  From  a  bronze  tripod 
on  which  some  aloes  were  burning  a  blu- 
ish thread  of  smoke  lifted  itself  up  spirally, 
like  a  rattlesnake  ready  to  spring. 

We  took  our  places  on  the  floor  like  the 
others,  and  after  a  few  words  from  the 
Hadji,  the  negro  served  us  with  coffee. 
Each  cup  was  prepared  separately,  and  you 
were  supposed  to  drink  the  grounds,  which 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  229 

constituted  a  third  of  the  allowance.  Nev- 
ertheless, it  was  a  delicious  beverage  —  up 
to  the  point  where  it  became  a  solid.  Then 
four  small  metal  pipes,  charged  with  Turk- 
ish tobacco  and  a  grain  or  two  of  mild 
opium,  were  brought  to  us.  Meanwhile  the 
musicians,  seated  at  the  upper  end  of  the 
room,  never  ceased  their  monotonous,  whin- 
ing strains.  Nobody  spoke.  The  younger 
fellows  lolled  back  against  the  wall,  motion- 
less, with  half-shut  eyes ;  the  blue  smoke 
slowly  floated  up  from  the  pipe-bowls,  and 
curled  itself  into  arabesque  patterns  over 
the  solemn,  turbaned  heads  of  the  old  Mus- 
sulmans — 

"  Viziers  nodding  together 
In  some  Arabian  night." 

After  a  while  a  man  of  fabulous  leanness 
arose,  and  began  a  kind  of  dance.  He 
danced  only  from  the  hips  upward,  sway- 
ing his  arms  in  the  air  as  he  contorted  his 
body,  and  accompanying  himself  with  a 
crooning  chant.  By-and-by  his  eyes  closed 


230    FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

ecstatically,  his  head  leaned  far  back,  an 
epileptic  foam  came  to  his  lips.  From  time 
to  time  one  of  the  spectators  jerked  out  a 
sharp  "  Jaleo  !  "  to  encourage  him,  others 
of  the  audience  beat  the  measure  on  the 
palms  of  their  hands,  and  the  tambourines 
kept  up  a  dull  thud.  It  was  in  every  re- 
spect the  same  dance  which  the  gitanos  ex- 
ecute less  passionately  in  Granada.  The 
man  ended  his  performance  abruptly,  and 
sat  down,  and  all  was  silent  again,  except 
that  the  doleful,  strident  music  went  on  and 
on,  with  pitiless  reiteration  of  the  same 
notes. 

Looking  at  it  carelessly,  it  struck  me 
that  Moorish  enjoyment  was  composed  of 
very  simple  ingredients ;  but  looking  closer, 
I  suspected  there  were  depths  and  qualities 
in  this  profound  and  nearly  austere  repose, 
in  this  smouldering  passion,  with  its  ca- 
pricious fiery  gleams,  which  I  had  not  pen- 
etrated. Perhaps  it  was  the  drug  in  the 
tobacco,  or  perhaps  it  was  a  pungent  prop- 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  231 

erty  in  the  coffee,  that  sharpened  my  sense, 
but  presently  I  began  to  detect  in  the  mu- 
sic, which  had  rather  irritated  me  at  first, 
an  under-current  of  meaning,  vague  and 
perplexing.  The  slow  dragging  andante 
and  the  sudden  wailing  falsetto  seemed  half 
to  assist  and  half  to  baffle  some  inarticulate 
spirit  that  strove  to  distill  its  secret  into 
the  ear.  Something  that  was  not  the  music 
itself  was  struggling  to  find  expression 
through  it  —  the  pride,  the  rage,  the  iner- 
tia, the  unutterable  despair  of  an  ancient 
and  once  mighty  people  passing  away. 


232     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PERTH. 


IV. 


IT  was  Sunday.  I  do  not  know  whose 
Sunday  it  was,  for  there  are  three  to  the 
week  in  Tangier,  the  Mohammedan,  the 
Jew,  and  the  Christian  having  each  his 
own.  It  was  Sunday ;  but  what  was  more 
to  the  purpose,  it  was  also  a  market-day.  I 
had  caught  the  town  in  one  of  its  spasms  of 
business.  Between  these  spasms,  and  when 
the  Aissawa  'are  not  overrunning  it,  or  no 
fete  is  going  on,  the  place  is  said  to  be  as 
dull  and  silent  as  a  plague-smitten  city. 

It  being  my  last  as  well  as  my  first  day 
in  Africa,  I  did  not  wait  for  the  Hadji  to 
call  me  that  morning.  I  was  an  early  bird, 
astir  even  before  the  slightest  worm  of  a 
breakfast  was  practicable.  Having  com- 
pleted my  toilet,  I  wandered  out  on  the 
platform  in  front  of  my  bedroom  to  kill  the 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  233 

intervening  hour.  Discovering  a  stone  stair- 
case leading  still  higher,  I  mounted  the 
steps,  and  found  myself  on  the  roof  of  the 
hotel. 

The  Kasba  on  the  height  had  all  its  win- 
dows illuminated  by  the  daybreak,  but  the 
rest  of  the  town  lay  in  cool  shadow.  At 
my  feet  stretched  a  confused  mass  of  square- 
cut  white  houses,  reaching  to  the  sea's  edge 
on  one  side,  and  ending  in  drifts  on  the 
slant  of  a  hill  at  my  left  —  a  town  of  snow 
that  had  seemingly  dropped  flake  by  flake 
from  the  clouds  during  the  night. 

There  were  figures  moving  on  several  of 
the  neighboring  house-tops.  All  the  roofs 
were  flat,  and  most  of  them  surrounded  by 
low  battlements.  Yonder  was  a  young  ne- 
gress  in  a  sulphur-hued  caftan  and  green 
girdle,  shaking  a  striped  rug  over  a  para- 
pet, and  looking  consciously  picturesque. 
On  a  terrace  farther  off  a  Mooiish  washer- 
woman and  a  little  girl  were  spreading  out 
their  harcks  and  embroidered  napkins  on 


234     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

the  flag-stones :  the  sun  would  reach  them 
by-and-by.  At  my  right  was  a  man  indo- 
lently lifting  himself  off  a  piece  of  carpet 
laid  dangerously  near  the  unprotected  roof 
edge  —  possibly  a  summer  boarder  who  had 
chosen  that  airy  bed-chamber.  He  was  rub- 
bing his  eyes,  and  had  evidently  slept  there 
over  night.  In  this  temperate  climate, 
where  the  thermometer  seldom  rises  above 
90°,  and  rarely  falls  below  40°,  the  house- 
top would  be  preferable  to  an  inside  room 
to  a  summer  boarder.  On  many  of  the 
roofs  was  evidence  of  pretty  attempts  at 
gardening,  oleanders,  acacias,  palms,  and 
dwarf  almond-trees  being  set  out  in  orna- 
mental jars  and  tubs.  There,  no  doubt,  was 
the  family  resort  after  night-fall,  the  scene 
of  ceremonious  or  social  visits,  and,  I  imag- 
ine, of  much  starry  love-making. 

Behind  the  hotel,  in  a  desolate  vacant 
lot  checkered  by  small  vats  half  filled  with 
dye-stuffs,  was  an  Arab  tanner  at  work. 
Standing  in  the  midst  of  his  colored  squares 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  235 

he  resembled  a  solitary  chessman.  I  could 
look  directly  down  on  his  smooth  bare 
skull,  which  seemed  cast  of  gilt-bronze  or 
bell-metal.  He  wore  nothing  but  a  breech- 
cloth.  The  Moorish  tanners  are  very  ex- 
pert, and  employ  arts  not  known  to  the 
trade  elsewhere.  They  have  a  process  by 
which  lion  and  panther  skins  are  rendered 
as  pliable  as  satin,  and  of  creamy  whiteness. 
The  green  leather  of  Tafilet,  the  red  of  Fez, 
and  the  yellow  of  Morocco  are  highly  es- 
teemed. 

I  was  still  on  the  roof-top  when  the 
Hadji  summoned  me  to  breakfast,  immedi- 
ately after  which  we  set  forth  on  a  stroll 
through  the  city.  The  streets  of  Tangier 
lose  a  little  on  close  inspection  by  daylight ; 
they  are  very  dirty  and  very  narrow,  form- 
ing a  labyrinth  from  which  a  stranger  could 
scarcely  extricate  himself  without  the  grace 
of  God.  I  was  constantly  imagining  that 
we  had  come  back  to  our  starting-point,  the 
houses  being  unnumbered,  and  without  any 


236  FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

feature  to  distinguish  one  from  the  other. 
It  was  like  walking  through  endless  ave- 
nues of  tombs.  Each  building  presented 
to  the  contracted  footway  an  inhospitable, 
massive  wall,  set  with  a  door  of  the  exact 
pattern  of  its  neighbor.  This  monotony  is 
a  characteristic  of  Oriental  street  architec- 
ture. No  wonder  the  robber  chief,  in  The 
Forty  Thieves,  put  a  chalk-mark  on  the 
door  of  Ali  Baba's  house  in  order  to  find 
it  again  ;  and  no  wonder  the  slave-girl 
Morgiana  completely  frustrated  the  device 
by  marking  half  a  dozen  doors  in  a  similar 
manner. 

Whatever  of  elegance  there  may  be  in- 
side the  Moorish  houses,  the  outside  is  care- 
ful to  give  no  hint  of  it.  I  believe  that 
some  of  the  interiors  are  lavishly  decorated. 
Once  or  twice,  in  passing  a  half-open  gate, 
I  caught  sight  of  a  tessellated  patio,  with  a 
fountain  set  in  the  midst  of  flowers  and 
broad-leaved  shrubbery,  reminding  me  of 
the  Andalusian  court-yards.  But  the  do- 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  237 

mestic  life  of  the  Mussulman  goes  veiled 
like  his  women. 

For  a  city  with  so  many  Sundays,  Tan- 
gier makes  a  rather  poor  exhibit  in  the  line 
of  sacred  architecture.  The  foreign  lega- 
tions have  a  secluded  chapel  somewhere, 
and  there  are  several  mosques  and  Jewish 
synagogues,  but  none  of  note,  except  the  Mo- 
hammedan mosque,  whose  porcelain-plated 
tower  is  the  best  part  of  it.  In  my  quality 
of  Christian  dog  I  was  not  admitted  to  the 
edifice.  The  Hadji  described  the  interior 
as  being  barren  of  interest.  When  the 
faithful  go  in  to  devotions  they  leave  their 
foot-covering  in  the  vestibule.  As  we  went 
by  that  morning  there  were  thirty  or  forty 
empty  slippers  of  all  sizes  and  colors  ar- 
ranged in  a  row  on  the  stone  pavement. 
They  suggested  the  remnants  of  a  row  of 
soldiers  that  had  been  blown  away  by  some 
phenomenal  volley. 

The  Moors  are  handsome  men,  haughty 
of  feature,  and  with  great  dignity  of  car- 


238     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

riage.  The  Arab  women,  of  whom  we  met 
not  so  many,  left  their  charms  to  the  imag- 
ination. Though  they  were  muffled  up  to 
the  eyelids,  showing  only  a  strip  of  buff 
forehead,  they  generally  turned  aside  their 
faces  as  we  approached  them.  Their  street 
costume  was  not  elaborate  —  a  voluminous 
linen  mantle,  apparently  covering  nothing 
but  a  wide-sleeved  chemise  reaching  to  the 
instep  and  caught  at  the  waist.  Their  bare 
feet  were  thrust  into  half-slippers,  and  their 
finger-tips  stained  with  henna.  Some  had 
only  one  eye  visible.  In  the  younger  wo- 
men, that  one  pensive  black  eye  peering 
out  from  the  snowy  coif  was  very  piquant. 
The  Hebrew  maidens  were  not  so  avari- 
cious of  themselves,  but  let  their  beauty 
frankly  blossom  in  doorways  and  at  upper 
casements.  Many  of  the  girls  were  as  slen- 
der and  graceful  as  vines.  In  their  apparel 
they  appeared  to  affect  solid  colors  —  blues, 
ochres,  carmines,  and  olive  greens.  They 
have  a  beautiful  national  dress,  which  is 


A   DAY  IN  AFRICA.  239 

worn  only  in  private.  The  Jewesses  of 
Tangier  are  famous  for  their  eyes,  teeth, 
and  complexions,  and  for  their  figures  in 
early  maidenhood.  At  thirty-five  they  are 
shapeless  old  women, 

"  Sans  teeth,  sans  eyes,  sans  taste,  sans  —  everything." 

The  increasing  number  of  passers-by,  and 
a  confused  buzz  of  voices  that  grew  every 
moment  more  audible,  indicated  that  we 
were  nearing  some  centre  of  traffic  or  pleas- 
ure. Leaving  a  fearful  alley  behind  us  — 
an  alley  where  heaps  of  refuse  were  piled 
in  the  middle  of  the  footpath,  and  the 
body  of  a  collapsed  cat  or  dog  was  continu- 
ally blocking  the  way  —  we  issued  upon 
the  place  of  the  bazars  —  a  narrow  winding 
hillside  thoroughfare,  paved  with  cobble- 
stones, and  lined  on  either  hand  by  a  series 
of  small  alcoves  scooped  in  the  masonry. 

In  each  of  these  recesses  a  Jew  or  an 
Arab  merchant  sat  cross-legged  upon  a  lit- 
tle counter,  with  his  goods  piled  within  con- 
venient reach  on  shelves  at  his  side  and 


240     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

over  his  head.  The  counter,  which  rose  to 
the  height  of  the  customer's  breast,  was 
really  the  floor  of  the  shop.  In  one  booth 
nothing  was  sold  but  steel-work  —  Damas- 
cus blades  (manufactured  round  the  corner) 
with  richly  wrought  hilts;  slim  Moorish 
guns  with  a  profusion  of  mother-of-pearl 
and  tortoise-shell  inlay  on  the  breeches; 
shields,  chains,  spurs,  bits,  and  the  like. 
In  an  angle  of  the  wall,  near  this  booth, 
was  a  half-naked  sword-grinder  serving  a 
Bedouin,  who  leaned  on  a  spear-handle, 
and  with  critical  eye  watched  the  progress 
of  the  workman.  Here  was  a  tobacconist, 
with  fragrant  Latakia  to  dispose  -  of,  and 
snake-stemmed  nargilehs  in  which  to  burn 
it;  there,  a  fruiterer,  buried  in  figs  and 
dates  and  sweetmeat  confections;  farther 
on,  a  jeweller,  or  a  dealer  in  nicknacks,  or 
a  saddle-maker.  The  smartest  shops  were 
those  of  the  cloth  merchants.  At  their 
doors  were  displayed  rose-colored  caftans, 
rivulets  of  scarfs  shot  with  silver  thread, 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  241 

broidered  towels,  Daghestan  rugs,  bright 
fabrics  from  Rabatt  and  Tetuan. 

There  was  no  lack  of  color  or  animation 
in  the  crowd ;  no  lack  of  customers  beating 
their  bosoms  and  exploding  with  incredu- 
lity at  the  prices  demanded  (I  saw  an  old 
Berber  in  front  of  one  bazar  tear  off  his 
turban  and  trample  on  it,  to  show  he  would 
give  no  such  price)  ;  no  lack  of  peripatetic 
venders  interf ering  with  legitimate  trade ; 
no  lack  of  noisy  water-sellers,  each  with  his 
sprig  of  scented  shrub  laid  over  his  water- 
skin;  there  was,  in  brief,  no  lack  of  any- 
thing proper  to  the  scene  and  the  moment ; 
yet  I  had  a  sense  of  disappointment,  and 
probably  expressed  it  in  my  face. 

"  Then  you  would  be  disappointed  in  the 
bazars  at  Damascus,"  said  the  Hadji,  sadly, 
for  he  had  the  honor  of  Tangier  at  heart. 
"  This  is  Damascus,  or  any  Eastern  city,  in 
small.  In  the  great  capitals  you  would  see 
more,  but  nothing  different.  The  bazars  at 
Constantinople  are  gay,  yes  ;  of  European 

16 


242     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTB. 

gayety,  you  understand  —  only  half  na- 
tional. These  are  the  shops  of  the  people 
such  as  you  will  see  through  the  East. 
But  there  are  other  establishments  of  richer 
merchants,  to  which  the  wise  go.  I  will 
take  you  to  one.  It  is  not  far." 

Before  quitting  the  mart,  I  entered  into 
a  slight  mercantile  transaction  with  the' 
fruiterer,  which  resulted  in  filling  both  my 
pockets  to  the  top  with  copper  coins  —  the 
surprising  change  due  me  out  of  a  two- 
franc  piece.  These  coins  are  worth  about  a 
dollar  a  bushel.  The  five-pointed  star,  or 
Solomon's  ring,  stamped  on  one  side,  is  sup- 
posed to  be  a  talisman  against  the  evil  eye ; 
but  it  can  scarcely  reconcile  the  Moors  to 
the  fact  that  the  government  pays  its  debts 
in  this  wretched  currency,  called  flu,  and 
will  receive  nothing  for  imposts  and  taxes 
but  silver  or  gold.  I  was  glad,  later  on,  to 
deposit  that  copper  with  a  necromancer  in 
the  Soc-de-Barra,  to  see  what  he  could  do 
with  it. 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  243 

The  shop  of  one  of  the  richer  merchants 
to  which  the  wise  go,  and  where  the  Hadji 
incontinently  took  me,  was  located  on  the 
second  floor  of  a  private  house  in  an  adja- 
cent side  street.  As  it  was  the  sole  house 
that  was  likely  to  show  me  its  penetralia, 
I  noted  that  it  had  a  square  court  in  the 
centre  open  to  the  sky,  and  that  all  the 
apartments  in  the  second  story  gave  upon  a 
gallery  overlooking  this  court-yard.  Here 
were  three  large  rooms  packed  from  floor 
to  cornice  with  a  little  of  everything  on 
earth  —  arms,  jewelry,  costumes,  bronzes, 
Moorish  faience,  sandal-wood  boxes,  amber 
beads,  old  brass  lamps  (for  which  any 
Aladdin  would  have  been  glad  to  exchange 
new  ones),  and  bale  upon  bale  of  silks  and 
fairy  textures  from  looms  of  Samarcand 
and  Bokhara.  Here,  also,  was  a  merchant 
who  pulled  a  face  as  smooth  as  a  mirror 
while  he  demanded  four  times  the  value  of 
his  merchandise.  Nevertheless,  I  purchased, 
on  reasonable  enough  terms,  a  chiselled 


244     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

brass  cresset  and  an  ancient  Moorish  scent- 
bottle  in  silver.  But  the  possession  of  these 
did  not  console  me  for  all  the  tantalizing 
drapery  and  golden  bric-a-brac  I  was  un- 
able to  purchase. 

"  Not  to  desire  or  admire,  if  a  man  could  learn  it,  were  more 
Than  to  walk  all  day  like  the  Sultan  of  old  in  a  garden  of 
spice." 

The  truly  wise  would  n't  go  to  the  shop  of 
Selam-Ben-Rhaman ! 

Passing  out  into  the  open  air  again,  we 
threaded  several  tortuous  lanes,  which 
clearly  had  not  been  visited  by  a  scaven- 
ger's cart  within  the  present  century,  and 
struck  the  main  street  at  a  point  near  the 
double  gates  leading  to  the  Soc-de-Barra. 
Speaking  of  carts,  there  is  not  one  of  any 
description  in  Tangier.  If  the  pedestrian 
gets  himself  run  over  there,  it  must  be  by 
a  donkey  pure  and  simple. 

A  dozen  steps  brought  us  outside  the 
turreted  wall  of  the  town  to  the  foot  of  the 
hill  called  Soc-de-Barra,  upon  a  slope  of 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  245 

which  was  the  market-place  —  a  barren 
stretch  of  sun-scorched  earth,  broken  here 
and  there  by  dunes  of  reddish-gray  sand. 
In  the  middle  foreground  was  the  caved-in 
mausoleum  of  some  forgotten  saint,  and  on 
the  ridge  of  the  slope  an  old  cemetery,  so 
dreary  with  its  few  hopeless  fig-trees  and 
aloes  that  it  made  the  heart  ache  to  look  at 
it.  Nothing  ever  gave  me  such  a  poignant 
sense  of  death  and  dusty  oblivion  as  those 
crumbling  tombs  overshadowing  the  clam- 
orous and  turbulent  life  on  the  hill-side. 

At  first  the  spectacle  was  bewildering, 
and  it  was  only  by  concentrating  my  atten- 
tion on  detached  groups  and  figures  that  I 
was  able  to  form  any  distinct  impression  of 
it.  One's  eyes  were  dazzled  by  the  innu- 
merable purple  caftans  and  red  fezes  and 
snowy  turbans,  mingling  and  separating, 
and  melting  every  instant  into  some  gro- 
tesque and  harmonious  combination,  like 
the  bits  of  colored  glass  in  a  kaleidoscope. 
The  usual  hurly-burly  of  a  market-day  had 


246     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTff. 

been  added  to  by  the  unexpected  arrival  of 
a  caravan  from  Fez. 

The  unloading  of  the  packs  was  now  go- 
ing on  amid  the  incessant  angry  disputes  of 
the  Arab  porters  and  occasional  remonstra- 
tive  groans  from  the  gaunt  camels  kneeling 
in  the  hot  sand.  Near  by,  on  a  lean  horse, 
sat  a  Bedouin,  with  his  gun  slung  over  the 
pommel.  He  was  dirty  and  ragged,  but 
his  crimson  saddle-cloth  was  worked  with 
gold  braid,  and  metal  ornaments  dangled 
from  his  bridle.  Bending  a  trifle  forward 
in  the  saddle,  the  son  of  the  desert  seemed 
to  be  intently  observing  the  porters,  but  in 
reality  he  was  half  listening  to  an  elderly 
Arab  who  sat  on  the  ground  a  few  paces 
distant,  surrounded  by  a  wholly  absorbed 
circle  of  listeners.  It  was  curious  to  watch 
their  mobile  faces  reflecting,  like  so  many 
mirrors,  the  various  changes  in  the  expres- 
sion of  the  speaker.  He  was  telling  a  story 
—  a  story  that  required  much  pressing  of 
the  hand  against  the  heart  and  many  swift 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  247 

transitions  from  joy  to  despair,  and  finally 
involved  a  pantomime  of  a  person  on  horse- 
back carrying  off  somebody.  A  love-story ! 
Perhaps  one  of  Scheherezade's.  The  spirit, 
though  not  the  letter,  of  it  reached  me.  I 
noticed,  with  proper  professional  pride,  that 
neither  the  mountebank  near  the  saint's 
tomb,  nor  the  snake-charmer  farther  up  the 
slope,  had  so  large  an  audience  as  the  story- 
teller. 

The  snake -tamer,  however,  honestly 
earned  his  hire  by  letting  an  ugly  cobra  de 
capello  draw  blood  from  his  cheek  to  the 
slow  music  of  a  reed  pipe  and  a  tambourine 
played  by  a  couple  of  assistants.  After 
wondering  at  the  man,  I  began  to  wonder 
at  the  serpent  for  biting  so  hideous  an  ob- 
ject. Only  less  hideous  was  his  neighbor, 
the  necromancer,  who  did  some  really 
clever  feats  of  fire-eating,  and  became  the 
recipient  at  my  hands  of  about  two  pounds 
of  copper  flu.  The  gratuity  seemed  to  have 
the  effect  of  putting  an  end  to  his  perform- 


248  FROM  PONKAPOG   TO  PESTH. 

ance,  for  lie  abruptly  disappeared  after  this 
accession  of  wealth. 

Both  these  men,  as  well  as  the  several 
mendacious  "saints"  who  were  collecting 
tribute  of  the  crowd,  belonged  to  that  fa- 
natical sect  known  as  the  Aissawa,  whose 
periodic  incursions  in  force  into  Tangier 
must  be  more  picturesque  than  agreeable, 
if  the  Hadji  gave  me  a  true  account  of 
them.  His  description  did  not  materially 
differ  from  that  which  I  find  in  an  admira- 
ble work  on  Morocco  by  Edmondo  de  Ami- 
cis,  from  which  I  quote :  "  The  Aissawa 
are  one  of  the  principal  religious  confra- 
ternities of  Morocco,  founded,  like  the  oth- 
ers, under  the  inspiration  of  God,  by  a 
saint  called  Sidi-Mohammed-ben-Aissa,  born 
at  Mekinez  two  centuries  ago.  .  .  .  They 
have  a  great  mosque  at  Fez,  which  is  the 
central  house  of  the  order,  and  from  thence 
they  spread  themselves  every  year  over  the 
provinces  of  the  empire,  gathering  together 
as  they  go  those  members  of  the  brother- 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  249 

hood  who  are  in  towns  and  villages.  Their 
rites,  similar  to  those  of  the  howling  and 
whirling  dervishes  of  the  East,  consist  in  a 
species  of  frantic  dances,  interspersed  with 
leaps,  yells,  and  contortions,  in  the  prac- 
tice of  which  they  grow  ever  more  furious 
and  ferocious,  until,  losing  the  light  of  rea- 
son, they  crush  wood  and  iron  with  their 
teeth,  burn  their  flesh  with  glowing  coals, 
wound  themselves  with  knives,  swallow 
mud  and  stones,  brain  animals  and  devour 
them  alive  and  dripping  with  blood,  and 
finally  fall  to  the  ground  insensible." 

If  I  had  chosen  my  day  in  Africa  a  week 
earlier,  I  should  have  witnessed  one  of 
those  edifying  festivals  ;  but  I  missed  that, 
as  well  as  the  fete  of  the  birth  of  Moham- 
med, on  which  occasion  the  Soc-de-Barra  is 
a  very  gay  spot.  At  all  times,  I  fancy,  it 
is  little  more  than  a  barbaric  play-ground. 

So  far  as  I  could  observe,  its  special 
claims  as  a  market  were  sustained  this  day 
only  by  four  or  five  isolated  clusters  of  aged 


250     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

crones,  who  squatted  under  striped  awnings, 
and  sold  bread,  pottery,  and  a  kind  of  grain 
called  durra,  which  forms  the  staple  food 
of  the  lower  classes.  I  have  seen  few  speci- 
mens of  Tangier  pottery  in  collections.  It 
is  very  rude,  and  utterly  wanting  in  most 
of  the  qualities  usually  prized ;  but  its  bril- 
liant glaze  and  the  barbaric  fancy  of  some 
of  its  designs  entitle  it  to  consideration.  I 
am  speaking  of  the  ware  used  by  the  com- 
mon people.  The  only  lively  trade  I  saw 
carried  on  in  the  market  was  done  in  those 
gaudily  tinted  jars  and  vases. 

The  majority  of  the  crowd  seemed  to 
have  no  purpose  whatever  beyond  wander- 
ing from  point  to  point  and  indulging  in 
as  many  gesticulations  as  possible.  Now 
and  then  a  mysterious  hush  fell  upon  the 
throng,  a  breathless  silence  broken  an 
instant  afterward  by  universal  chatter. 
Neither  the  sudden  silence  nor  the  sudden 
clamor  explained  itself.  Underlying  it  all 
was  a  profound  melancholy.  Here,  three 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  251 

or  four  half-grown  Soudan  negroes  lay  on 
their  backs,  blinking  at  the  sky ;  there,  a 
squad  of  venerable  Rifans  leaned  apathet- 
ically against  a  whitewashed  wall  in  the 
strong  sunshine  —  meagre,  dry  old  men, 
looking  like  mummies,  that  had  warmed 
into  a  semblance  of  life,  and  had  partially 
thrown  aside  their  cerements.  The  mo- 
ment a  person  ceased  speaking  and  moving, 
he  became  a  statue  of  weariness.  It  was  a 
relief  to  watch  a  score  or  two  of  comical 
little  Arab  boys  —  the  exact  pattern  of 
Tanagra  figurines  —  darting  in  and  out 
among  the  confusion  of  legs,  and  making 
up  impertinent  faces  under  their  peaked 
hoods,  as  some  irate  by-stander  from  time 
to  time  gave  one  of  them  an  impromptu 
taste  of  a  lance-handle. 

Suddenly  I  caught  a  glimpse  of  my  fel- 
low-voyager the  Dutch  artist,  with  his  easel 
planted  in  a  shadow  of  the  wrinkled  wall, 
sketching  away  like  mad.  I  envied  him, 
for  to  a  painter  this  Soc-de-Barra  should  be 


252     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

a  mine  of  wealth.  Indeed,  all  Tangier  is 
that.  Fortuny  and  Henri  Regnault  have 
taught  us  how  rich  it  is.  The  latter,  after 
receiving  the  Prix  de  Rome,  resided  a  long 
time  in  Tangier.  It  was  here  he  painted 
his  magnificent  "  Execution  sans  Jugement 
sous  les  Rois  maures  de  Grenade  " ;  and  it 
was  from  his  Arabian  dreams  in  the  old 
Moorish  town  that  he  awoke  at  the  fall  of 
Sedan,  and  hurried  to  give  his  life,  as  free- 
ly as  he  had  given  his  genius,  to  France. 
Regnault  met  his  death,  futilely,  in  almost 
the  last  engagement  of  the  war  —  if  it  is 
futile  to  be  a  hero. 

He  was  still  in  my  thought  as  I  turned 
back  to  the  city  gate,  for  my  next  excur- 
sion was  to  the  hill  of  the  Kasba  —  a  spot 
associated  with  his  memory.  The  treasury 
building  in  the  Kasba  furnished  him  with 
the  background  of  his  "  Sortie  du  Pacha  " 
—  one  of  Regnault's  masterpieces. 

Without  this  fact  the  citadel  itself  would 
poorly  have  rewarded  me  for  the  hot  climb 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  253 

up  the  hill-side.  The  governor,  or  bashaw, 
has  his  residence  in  the  castle,  which  is 
garrisoned.  I  believe  there  was  a  horrible 
prison  hidden  somewhere  in  its  depths,  but 
I  did  not  attempt  to  visit  it.  Doubtless 
the  stucco-work  of  the  innumerable  apart- 
ments I  looked  into  was  once  as  gorgeous 
with  gold-leaf  and  pigment  as  the  mezquita 
at  Cordova,  or  the  Hall  of  the  Abencer- 
rages  in  the  Alharnbra ;  but  nothing  of  the 
past  richness  remained.  Here  and  there 
on  a  moulding  or  at  the  base  of  a  column  a 
line  in  Cufic  characters  or  an  embossed  sen- 
tence from  the  Koran  tamely  wriggled  out 
from  the  whitewash.  That  was  all.  The 
sacrilegious  brush  of  man  had  done  as  much 
damage  there  as  the  hand  of  time. 

The  architecture  did  not  pay  me  for  my 
pains,  but  I  was  amply  paid  by  being  al- 
lowed to  assist  at  a  Moorish  court  of  jus- 
tice, upon  which  the  Hadji  and  I  stumbled 
by  chance.  The  judge,  or  cadi  —  I  am  not 
positive  as  to  the  cadiship  —  was  seated  on 


254     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

a  Persian  rug  in  the  middle  of  a  room  small 
enough  and  gloomy  enough  to  be  a  cell. 
Behind  him  was  ranged  a  row  of  barefooted 
soldiers ;  in  front  of  him  stood  plaintiff  and 
defendant,  alike  abject.  Each  in  turn  de- 
livered himself  of  a  long  speech  containing 
frequent  allusions  to  Allah,  and  relapsed 
into  silence.  When  the  pair  had  finished, 
the  flabby  judge  sat  awhile,  ruminative, 
with  his  chin  buried  in  his  beard ;  then  he 
lifted  his  face  and  pronounced  sentence. 
Without  more  ado,  one  of  the  men  —  the 
plaintiff,  likely  enough — was  hauled  into 
the  court-yard,  just  outside,  and  prepara- 
tions were  making  to  give  him  a  dozen 
lashes  with  a  cat-o'- nine -tails,  when  we 
hastened  our  departure.  I  expected  noth- 
ing but  to  see  his  head  snipped  off  before 
we  could  get  out  of  the  place.  A  vision  of 
that  splash  of  blood  on  the  white  marble 
stairs  in  Regnault's  picture  danced  in  front 
of  iny  eyes. 

The  Hadji  laughingly  remarked  that  the 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  255 

fellow  had  met  with  no  more  than  his  de- 
serts. The  laws  of  Morocco  are  extremely 
severe  ;  it  is  seldom  that  either  the  guilty 
or  the  innocent  escape.  The  penalty  for 
petty  larceny  is  so  rigorous  that  the  offense 
is  comparatively  unknown,  except  in  the 
interior,  where  robbery  and  murder  are  rec- 
ognized professions.  The  nomads  and  the 
people  of  the  duars  live  by  plundering  car- 
avans and  straggling  travellers.  But  at 
Tangier,  under  the  flags  of  the  legations,  a 
stranger's  life  and  property  are  more  secure 
than  in  one  of  our  American  cities.  In  a 
community  where  a  man  loses  his  right 
hand  if  he  helps  himself  to  somebody  else's 
hen,  the  love  of  poultry,  for  example,  be- 
comes discreet  and  chastened.  The  door  of 
my  bedroom  at  the  hotel  had  no  fastening 
on  it,  and  needed  none. 

It  was  now  three  o'clock,  and  time  for 
me  to  return  to  the  inn.  My  twenty-four 
hours  of  Africa  were  drawing  to  a  close. 
The  little  steamer  that  was  to  take  me 


256     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

back  to  Gibraltar,  immediately  after  an 
early  dinner,  was  already  spreading  some 
coquettish  sooty  curls  over  her  smoke-stack. 
Before  descending  to  level  ground,  and 
plunging  once  more  into  the  intricacies  of 
the  lower  town,  I  lingered  a  few  minutes 
on  the  heights  of  the  Kasba  to  take  a  fare- 
well look. 

It  is  a  very  ancient  city,  the  oldest  city 
but  one  in  the  world.  The  Moors  of  Spain 
in  the  time  of  Aboo-Abdallah  made  pilgrim- 
ages to  it  on  account  of  its  antiquity.  The 
cloth-merchants,  and  the  swarthy  money- 
changers, and  the  shrill  water-carriers  were 
plying  their  trade,  and  all  the  indolent,  fe- 
verish life  we  witness  to-day  was  seething, 
in  these  narrow  streets  when  Christ  was  a 
little  child  in  Nazareth. 

Founded  in  some  unknown  period,  by 
the  Carthaginians  it  is  supposed,  Tangier 
—  the  Tingis  of  the  Romans  —  has  always 
been  a  bone  of  bloody  contention  among 


A  DAY  IN  AFRICA.  257 

the  nations.  In  the  reign  of  Claudius  it 
became  the  capital  of  the  province  Mauri- 
tania Tingitana,  and  was  an  important  city. 
Wrested  from  the  Romans,  it  passed  suc- 
cessively under  the  rule  of  the  Vandals, 
Greeks,  Saracens,  and  Arabs.  In  1471, 
Tangier  fell  into  the  possession  of  the  Por- 
tuguese, who,  in  1662,  ceded  it  to  England 
as  a  portion  of  the  dower  of  the  Infanta 
Catherine  of  Braganza,  queen  of  Charles 
II.  The  English,  finding  that  the  occupa- 
tion was  not  worth  the  cost,  abandoned  the 
place  in  1684,  after  demolishing  the  mole. 
Here  a  quaint  and  incongruous  figure  ap- 
pears for  an  instant  on  the  scene  —  the  fig- 
ure of  Mr.  Samuel  Pepys.  I  think  it  was 
a  conception  of  high  humor  on  the  part  of 
Charles  II.  to  send  Mr.  Pepys  among  the 
Moors,  for  it  was  by  the  king's  order 
that  he  accompanied  Lord  Dartmouth  with 
the  fleet  dispatched  to  destroy  the  sea-wall. 
This  precautionary  piece  of  engineering  left 
the  bay  of  Tangier  in  such  plight  as  to  ren- 
17 


258     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

der  the  town  impossible  of  approach  by 
large  vessels,  except  in  the  rarest  weather. 
The  ruins  of  the  old  mole  are  still  visible 
at  low  tide,  ragged,  honeycombed  blocks 
of  masonry,  looking,  when  seen  through  the 
transparent  emerald  of  the  Mediterranean, 
like  ledges  of  silver. 

The  water  in  the  harbor  is  so  shallow 
that  until  the  present  emperor  projected  a 
landing  for  small  boats,  the  visitor  arriving 
there  by  sea  was  forced  to  go  ashore  on  the 
back  of  a  native.  This  has  been  the  em- 
peror's sole  concession  to  the  spirit  of  mod- 
ern progress.  During  the  last  hundred 
years  —  But  my  strong  interest  in  the  his- 
toric part  of  Tangier  ends  with  Mr.  Pepys. 

From  any  point  of  view  the  hoary  little 
town  is  vastly  interesting :  the  remoteness 
and  obscurity  of  its  origin,  the  sieges,  pesti- 
lences, and  massacres  it  has  undergone,  and 
the  tenacity  with  which  it  clings  to  prim- 
itive customs  and  beliefs,  are  so  many 
charms.  To  walk  its  streets  is  to  breathe 


A  DAT  IN  AFRICA.  259 

the  air  of  Scriptural  times.  There,  to-day, 
fishermen  costumed  like  Peter  are  dragging 
their  nets  on  the  sandy  shingle  outside  the 
gates ;  at  the  fountain  stands  Rebekah 
with  her  water-jar  poised  on  her  head,  and 
a  hand's-breadth  of  brown  bosom  lying  bare 
between  the  green  and  yellow  folds  of  her 
robe.  To-day,  as  eighteen  hundred  years 
ago,  a  pallid,  hook-nosed  man  shuffles  by 
counting  some  coins  in  his  palm  —  the  veri- 
table thirty  pieces  of  silver,  perhaps.  If  it 
be  not  Judas  Iscariot  himself,  then  it  is  a 
descendant,  and  a  striking  family  likeness. 
In  brief,  Tangier  is  a  colossal  piece  of  bric- 
a-brac  which  one  would  like  to  own. 

A  countryman  of  ours,  a  New  Yorker  if 
I  remember,  once  proposed  to  purchase 
Shakespeare's  house  at  Stratford,  and  trans- 
port it  bodily  to  Central  Park.  I  had  a 
like  impulse  touching  Tangier.  Perhaps  I 
may  be  permitted  to  say  that  in  a  certain 
sense  I  have  brought  it  home  with  me,  and 
set  it  up  on  the  edge  of  Ponkapog  Pond. 


IX. 
ON  GETTING  BACK  AGAIN. 


IX. 
ON  GETTING  BACK  AGAIN. 

THIS  page  will  be  wafted  possibly  through 
a  snow-storm  to  the  reader's  hand;  but  it  is 
written  while  a  few  red  leaves  are  still 
clinging  to  the  maple  bough,  and  the  last 
steamer  of  the  year  from  across  the  ocean 
has  not  yet  discharged  on  our  shores  the 
final  cargo  of  returning  summer  tourists. 
How  glad  they  will  be,  like  those  who 
came  over  hi  previous  ships,  to  sight  that 
phantomish,  white  strip  of  Yankee  land 
called  Sandy  Hook  !  It  is  thinking  of  them 
that  I  write. 

Some  one  —  that  anonymous  person  who 
is  always  saying  the  wisest  and  most  de- 
lightful things  just  as  you  are  on  the  point 
of  saying  them  yourself  —  has  remarked 
that  one  of  the  greatest  pleasures  of  foreign 


264          FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

travel  is  to  get  home  again.  But  no  one  — 
that  irresponsible  person  forever  to  blame 
in  railway  accidents,  but  whom,  on  the 
whole,  I  vastly  prefer  to  his  garrulous  rela- 
tive quoted  above  —  no  one,  I  repeat,  has 
pointed  out  the  composite  nature  of  this 
pleasure,  or  named  the  ingredient  in  it 
which  gives  the  chief  charm  to  this  getting 
back.  It  is  pleasant  to  feel  the  pressure  of 
friendly  hands  once  more ;  it  is  pleasant  to 
pick  up  the  threads  of  occupation  which 
you  dropped  abruptly,  or  perhaps  neatly 
knotted  together  and  carefully  laid  away, 
just  before  you  stepped  on  board  the  steam- 
er; it  is  very  pleasant,  when  the  summer 
experience  has  been  softened  and  subli- 
mated by  time,  to  sit  of  a  winter  night  by 
the  cheery  wood  fire,  or  even  at  the  regis- 
ter, since  one  must  make  one's  self  comfort- 
able in  so  humiliating  a  fashion,  and  let 
your  fancy  wander  back  in  the  old  foot- 
prints ;  to  form  your  thoughts  into  happy 
summer  pilgrims,  and  dispatch  them  to 


ON  GETTING  BACK  AGAIN.      265 

Aries  or  Nuremberg,  or  up  the  vine-clad 
heights  of  Monte  Cassino,  or  embark  them 
at  Vienna  for  a  cruise  down  the  swift  Dan- 
ube to  Buda-Pesth.  But  in  none  of  these 
things  lies  the  subtile  charm  I  wish  to  indi- 
cate. It  lies  in  the  refreshing,  short-lived 
pleasure  of  being  able  to  look  at  your  own 
land  with  the  eyes  of  an  alien  ;  to  see  nov- 
elty blossoming  on  the  most  commonplace 
and  familiar  stems ;  to  have  the  old  man- 
ner and  the  threadbare  old  custom  present 
themselves  to  you  as  absolutely  new  —  or 
if  not  new,  at  least  strange.  After  you 
have  escaped  from  the  claws  of  the  custom- 
house officers  —  who  are  not  nearly  as  af- 
fable birds  as  you  once  thought  them  — 
and  are  rattling  in  an  oddly  familiar  hack 
through  well-known  but  half-unrecogniza- 
ble streets,  you  are  struck  by  something 
comical  in  the  names  on  the  shop  signs,  — 
are  American  names  comical,  as  English- 
men seem  to  think  ?  —  by  the  strange  fash- 
ion of  the  iron  lamp-post  at  the  corner,  by 


266     FROM  PONKAPOG  TO  PESTH. 

peculiarities  in  the  architecture,  which  you 
ought  to  have  noticed,  but  never  did  notice 
until  now.  The  candid  incivility  of  the 
coachman,  who  does  not  touch  his  hat  to 
you,  but  swears  at  you,  has  the  vague 
charm  of  reminiscence.  You  regard  him  as 
the  guests  regarded  the  poor  relation  at 
table,  in  Lamb's  essay;  you  have  an  im- 
pression that  you  have  seen  him  somewhere 
before.  The  truth  is,  for  the  first  time  in 
your  existence,  you  have  a  full,  unpreju- 
diced look  at  the  shell  of  the  civilization 
from  which  you  emerged  when  you  went 
abroad.  Is  it  a  pretty  shell  ?  Is  it  a  satis- 
factory shell  ?  Not  entirely.  It  has  strange 
excrescences  and  blotches  on  it.  But  it  is 
a  shell  worth  examining  ;  it  is  the  best  you 
can  ever  have ;  and  it  is  expedient  to  study 
it  very  carefully  the  two  or  three  weeks  im- 
mediately following  your  return  to  it,  for 
your  privilege  of  doing  so  is  of  the  briefest 
tenure.  Some  precious  things  you  do  not 
lose,  but  your  newly  acquired  vision  fails 


ON  GETTING  BACK  AGAIN.  267 

you  shortly.  Suddenly,  while  you  are  com- 
paring, valuing,  and  criticising,  the  old 
scales  fall  over  your  eyes,  you  insensibly 
slip  back  into  the  well-worn  grooves,  and 
behold  all  outward  and  most  inward  things 
in  nearly  the  same  light  as  your  untra veiled 
neighbor,  who  has  never  known 

"  The  glory  that  was  Greece 

And  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome." 

You  will  have  to  go  abroad  again  to  renew 
those  magical  spectacles  which  enabled  you 
for  a  few  weeks  to  see  your  native  land. 


